Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Sunday, December 14, 2008

Growth of OA in 2008

Heather Morrison, Dramatic Growth of Open Access: 2008 Early Annual Edition, Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, December 13, 2008.  Excerpt:

This is a special early annual edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series, to facilitate predictions and planning for the coming year. Annual figures are for a full year, Dec. 11, 2007 - Dec. 11, 2008.

Dramatic Growth of Open Access 2008 - Highlights

While at the local level, institutional repository coordinators report (accurately) that recruiting content is difficult and growth no doubt seems very slow, at a global level the growth rate of material in archives is absolutely phenomenal.

Scientific Commons

  • 24 million publications, 963 repositories
  • increase of 45% or 7 million publications in the past year
  • adding close to 150,000 publications per week
OAIster
  • 19 million items
  • 4.8 million items added in the past year, a 34% increase
  • 137 repositories added in the past year

Material searchable through a Canadian harvesting service, the CARL Metadata Harvester, increased by 67%.

PubMedCentral

  • over half a million fulltext items added, a 52% increase (based on ROAR data)
  • 538 journals participating; 413 provide immediate free access, 288 provide full open access
  • this quarter - 46 more journals participating in PMC, 38 more with free text immediately available, 31 more open access
The Directory of Open Access Journals
  • 3,781 journals
  • 781 journals added in the past year,
  • growth rate 2 titles per day

There have been some minor decreases in numbers. Highwire Free lost one completely free site; the CARL Metadata Harvester is harvesting one less repository. The PMC Free figures for full-text for recent entries is down slightly. DOAJ new titles is low this month, at 47; this is more likely to reflect staffing fluctuations at DOAJ than anything else.

arXiv: 512,366 e-prints, 13% increase

RePEC: 555,000 items online (670,000 total), 25% increase in fulltext

E-LIS: 8,654 documents, 23% increase
59 Open Access Mandate policies (ROARMAP), 11 proposed policies

For comparison purposes, see the December 11, 2007 Interim Dramatic Growth of Open Access

Highlights: Last year I predicted that 15% of the world's peer-reviewed journals would be OA by the end of 2008. This number has been surpassed. Last year, the DOAJ growth rate was 1.4 titles per day; this year, it is over 2 titles per day. Last year, there were 40 OA policies; now, there are more than 50.

[PS:  Here omitting Heather's predictions for 2009.]

Open Data - data only Google Spreadsheet (for viewing)

Open Data - data plus growth Google Spreadsheet (for viewing)

Dataverse - for downloading