Cross-posted from The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics

While many aspects of our lives and activities have slowed down during the COVID pandemic, this has not been the case with open access! The OA initiatives tracked through this series continue to show  strong growth on an annual and quarterly basis. Important milestones are being reached, and others will be coming soon.

Highlights

The Directory of Open Access Journals now lists over 15,000 fully open access, peer reviewed journals, having added 379 journals (> 4 per day) in the past quarter, and now provides searching for over 5 million articles at the article level.

A PubMed search for “cancer” limited to literature from the past 5 years now links to full-text for over 50% of the articles.

The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine now cross-searches over 8,000 repositories and will soon surpass the milestone of a quarter billion documents.

Anyone worried about running out of cultural materials during the pandemic will be relieved to note that the Internet Archive has exceeded a milestone of 6 million movies in addition to over 27 million texts (plus audio, concerts, TV, collections, webpages, and software).

Analysis of quarterly and annual growth for 39 indicators from 10 services reflecting open access publishing and archiving (Internet Archive, Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, Directory of Open Access Books, bioRxiv, PubMedCentral, PubMed, SCOAP3, Directory of Open Access Journals, RePEC and arXiv) demonstrates ongoing robust growth beyond the baseline growth of scholarly journals and articles of 3 – 3.5 per year. Growth rates for these indicators ranged from 4% – 100% (doubling). 26 indicators had a growth rate of over 10%, 15 had a growth rate of over 20%, and 6 had a growth rate of over 40%. The full list can be found in this table.

Thank you to everyone in the open access movement for continuing the hard work that makes this growth possible.

The open data edition is available here:   

Morrison, Heather, 2020, “Dramatic Growth of Open Access Sept. 30, 2020”, https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/AVBOW6, Scholars Portal Dataverse, V2 

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series.  

Cite as: Morrison, H. (2020). Dramatic Growth of Open Access September 30, 2020. The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics https://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2020/10/dramatic-growth-of-open-access.html

2019 was another great year for open access! Of the 57 macro-level global OA indicators included in The Dramatic Growth of Open Access, 50 (88%) have growth rates that are higher than the long-term trend of background growth of scholarly journals an d articles of 3 – 3.5% (Price, 1963; Mabe & Amin, 2001). More than half had growth rates of 10% or more, approximately triple the background growth rate, and 13 (nearly a quarter) had growth rates of over 20%.

Newer services have an advantage when growth rates are measured by percentage, and this is reflected in the over 20% 2019 growth category. The number of books in the Directory of Open Access Books tops the growth chart by nearly doubling (98% growth); bioRxiv follows with 74% growth. A few services showed remarkable growth on top of already substantial numbers. As usual, Internet Archive stands out with a 68% increase in audio recordings, a 58% increase incollections, and a 48% increase in software. The number of articles searchable through DOAJ grew by over 900,000 in 2019 (25% growth). OpenDOAR is taking off in Asia, the Americas, Africa, and overall, with more than 20% growth in each of these categories, and SCOAP3 also grew by more than 20%.

The only area indicating some cause for concern is PubMedCentral. Although overall growth of free full-text from PubMed is robust. A keyword search for “cancer” yields about 7% – 10% more free full-text than a year ago. However, there was a slight decrease in the number of journals contributing to PMC with “all articles open access”, a drop of 138 journals or a 9% decrease. I have double-checked and the 2018 and 2019 PMC journal lists have been posted in the dataverse in case anyone else would like to check (method: sort the “deposit status” column and delete all Predecessor and No New Content journals, then sort the “Open Access” column and count the number of journals that say “All”. The number of journals submitting NIH portfolio articles only grew by only 1. Could this be backtracking on the part of publishers or perhaps technical work underway at NIH?

Full data is available in excel and csv format from: Morrison, Heather, 2020, “Dramatic Growth of Open Access Dec. 31, 2019”, https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/CHLOKU, Scholars Portal Dataverse, V1

References

Cross-posted from the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics

Highlights

There are now 150 publishers of peer-reviewed open access books listed in the Directory of Open Access Books, publishing more than 4,400 open access books. 620 books were published in this quarter alone, a 16% increase in just this quarter.

The Directory of Open Access Journals has been adding titles at a net rate of 6 titles per day, 540 journals added this quarter for a total of over 11,000 journals. This is the highest DOAJ growth rate since this series started!

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine repositories collectively added more than 4.7 million documents this quarter for a total of just under 89 million documents.

SCOAP3 nearly doubled in size this past year (87% annual growth) for a total of 4,690 documents. arXiv grew by over 107,000 documents to over 1.1 million documents during the same time frame.

Internet Archive is likely to be featured in the next issue as it is currently edging towards a milestone of 10 million free texts.

The number of journals actively participating in PubMedCentral, making all content immediately freely accessible, and making all content open access, continues to grow. Meanwhile at PubMed a transition in indexing practice (from manual to automatic) means that a search for NIH-funded articles in the last 90 days significantly underreports results (1,402 NIH funded articles in the past 90 days compared with a range of 7,846 – 19,790 with a 90-day search limit for NIH funded article since 2008). Without the indexing, it is not possible to determine the percentage of full text. Here’s hoping the automated indexing process results in a catch-up soon; it doesn’t matter very much if the statistics for this series fall a bit behind, but people rely on this indexing to search for medical information.

The Electronic Journals Library added 3,612 journals that can be read free-of-charge in the past year, for a total of 52,000 journals, a 7% growth rate.

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series. Open data can be downloaded from the Dramatic Growth of Open Access dataverse.

Cite as:

Morrison, H. (2016). March 31 Dramatic Growth of Open Access. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir Les Savoirs Communs. Retrieved from https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2016/04/12/march-31-dramatic-growth-of-open-access/