[Highwire Press, HWP] now hosts more than 1,000 journals....You will find about 1.2 million open access full-text articles on HWP, representing close to 40% of all the articles of its database. There are open access abstracts for about 1.9 million articles....If you include PubMed in your search on HWP, the total number of open access bibliographic records goes up to 17.3 million and the number of open access abstracts of articles to about seven million. Unfortunately, the HWP versions of the PubMed records do not display when articles...are open access. Instead, it links the user to the Infotrieve document delivery service which charges $28 for every item from this publication. This is a weak point of HWP as there are links in PubMed to 1.2 million open access full-text articles with obvious icons.
The HWP stable itself is large, but it is not the largest. Elsevier (through its ever-improving Scirus subsidiary) has open access bibliographic information for about 6.4 million articles and open access abstracts for about 4.2 million. There are about 7.5 million full-text articles in the native Elsevier ScienceDirect database, but, except for some temporary freebies, these are accessible only for subscribers (although the full text is searchable for anyone)....
OJC has almost as many (about 100,000) open access full-text articles from OUP journals alone....The highlight of OJC is the significant subset of full-text open access journal articles in addition to the open access for more than 800,000 bibliographic description records and the nearly 180,000 open access abstracts. HWP identifies the open access journals with Free Site and Free Issues labels. There are no such labels or markers on the journal list page of the oxfordjournals.org site. You can compare the complete list of OUP journals hosted by HWP to the OUP version. The former shows which journals have free issues. I have summarized the highlights that may not be obvious from the list for the casual visitors and reviewers. Although OUP has “only” two free sites, they host the top-ranking Nucleic Acids Research and the Nucleic Acids Symposium Series, which offer more than 12,000 full-text documents. There are many other OUP journals labeled as having Free Issues, and sometimes the label is an understatement. For example, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute has more than 5,200 open access full-text articles representing 90% of the entire online collection for this top-notch journal. The same proportion is true for the more than 3,000 items from another much respected journal: Molecular Biology and Evolution. For Rheumatology the proportion is only 85%, but the absolute number of open access journal articles is close to 6,000....Open access availability is not immediate upon publishing, except for the Nucleic Acids titles. Many of the articles become open access after a one- or a two-year moratorium. Life science journals dominate the free subset, which is appropriate. Arts and humanities journals have practically no full-text freebies and they hardly have free abstracts. Social science journals are somewhere in-between in terms of open access content....[OJC] is an outstanding source - even for those who don’t have subscriptions for OUP journals in their library - for discovering good articles and to find an open access version of the ones that seem relevant and pertinent.
PS: I've omitted javascript links from this excerpt, since they will only work from the Gale site. Please see the original for details I've omitted and for all the working links.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/06/2006 11:25:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
