Just over a year ago, this blog post introduced the concept of the Open Access Quotient, an easy-to-calculate metric for the fraction of the biomedical literature that is immediately freely accessible in full text form, for a given subject area. [PS: Blogged here 7/23/07.]
Now seems as good a time as any to revisit this metric, to get a sense of what progress has been made in opening up the literature. Has the growth of open access publishing, and the strengthening of the NIH open access policy, had a measurable impact on the accessibility of research?
Looking at the biomedical literature has a whole, there has clearly been progress. The fraction of recent PubMed abstracts that will link the users straight through to the fulltext, with no permission barrier getting in the way, is up from 6.8% to 8.45%. There's still a long way to go, but that's a lot more immediate open access articles (about 1000 more per month, in fact)....[PS: Omitting two charts.]
It is clear that open access is close to becoming the norm rather than the exception for publications in areas such as malaria [OAQ up from 19.6% last year to 35.6% this year] and genomics [OAQ up from 12.9% last year to 18.5% this year] , and the take-up of open access in these areas seems to still be growing fast, rather than showing any signs of plateauing. Just as encouraging is the doubling in the proportion of clinical trials publications that are now open access [up from 4.0% last year to 9.7% this year] ....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/03/2008 11:10:00 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.
