PubMed Central submissions are quickly approaching another milestone number, falling just one submission short of 4000 for the month of July. According to National Institutes of Health (NIH) statistics, monthly (??) submissions as of July 31 were 3,999, a significant 65 percent spike from the 2610 submissions in June. With the latest numbers yet to be assessed, it is too early to tell whether the major uptick in submissions in July is an anomaly, but the latest numbers make clear that since the official enactment of the NIH's mandatory public access policy in April, 2008, submissions are rising significantly—and rapidly.
As LJAN reported in July, beginning in the first month following passage of the new policy, January 2008, monthly submissions to PMC have risen quickly. Just before the policy officially took effect, submissions spiked to 1852 total submissions in March, then to 2,765 in April (the policy became mandatory April 7) and 2,593 in May. The April/May 2008 figures represented well over double the number of submissions for the same months in 2007 under a "voluntary" submission policy (1,198 PMC submissions in April '07; 948 in May '07). Numbers for August were not yet posted.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/04/2008 05:54:00 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.
