Scientific Commons added 1.3 million items, and more than a quarter of a million authors! OpenDOAR added more than 100 new repositories, and now boasts over 1,100 listings!
The most remarkable story of the quarter, though, is an apparent acceleration of growth of open access publishing, as measured by the number of titles in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). There was a net growth of 271 titles in DOAJ in the first quarter of 2008, an average of just under 3 titles per day, up considerably from last year's average of 1.4 titles per day.
The emergence of new open access publisher Bentham Open was definitely a factor in this acceleration; however, even if all 43 Bentham titles presently in DOAJ are eliminated, there is still a net increase of 228 titles this quarter, or an average of 2.5 titles per day, close to double the growth rate of 2007.
At this rate, about the end of the next quarter, OA publishing will reach another milestone: 15% of scholarly peer-reviewed journals will be fully open access (conservative, based on estimate of 20-25,000 peer-reviewed journals in the world).
In the next quarter, the numbers to watch will be PubMedCentral, with the NIH policy requiring, rather than requesting, open access to NIH-funded research as of April 7, 2008. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 4/01/2008 03:34:00 PM.
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.
