Re: Dramatic growth of open access

["Sally Morris \(ALPSP\)" <sally.morris@alpsp.org>]

All (healthy) journals increase their article output somewhat 
year by year, though this is to some extent offset (at least in 
the best of them) by rising acceptance standards.  So any growth 
in OA *articles* would need to be measured as a %age of total 
article output in any given period. I'm not sure this has been 
done, though it must surely be possible

Sally Morris, Chief Executive
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK
Email:  sally.morris@alpsp.org

----- Original Message -----
From: <matt@biomedcentral.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2006 1:12 AM
Subject: Re: Dramatic growth of open access

> "I don't think the data show that open access continues to grow
> dramatically, not in medicine at least"
>
> There are a several reasons that a year by year analysis of the
> DOAJ, is not really suitable as a metric for the growth of OA.
>
> Firstly, as has been discussed recently on this list, the DOAJ
> does not list the year that a journal went open access. Rather
> (as I understand it) it lists the first year for which OA content
> is available from the journal concerned. As such, any journals
> which have converted to open access, rather than starting as open
> access journals, are assigned to the wrong year in the analysis
> below, underestimating the number of journals going OA in recent
> years, and overestimating the number of OA journals launched in
> the past.
>
> (2) The number of open access journals is in any case an poor
> proxy for the overall growth of open access publishing. BioMed
> Central launched 50+ titles in the year 2000 (contributing to an
> apparent peak in new open access journals in that year). That is
> the most journals BioMed Central ever launched in a single year.
> So did we "peak" in 2000? Hardly. BioMed Central published 5586
> peer reviewed open access articles in 2005, compared to 224 in
> 2000 - a 25-fold increase, and we continue to see very strong
> year on year growth.
>
> (3) Looking a the number of journals in the DOAJ fails to account
> for the growing take up of optional open access (e.g. as
> practiced by PNAS et al.) and also fails to distinguish between
> huge open access journals (like NAR) and tiny ones.
>
> A better approach would be to analyse the number of immediate
> open access articles published year on year. This is challenging
> to do, not least because several years on it is very difficult to
> be sure what *was* open access at the moment of publication. But
> that is really the metric that counts.
>
> Matthew Cockerill, Ph.D.
> Publisher
> BioMed Central ( http://www.biomedcentral.com/ )
> 34-42, Cleveland Street
> London
> W1T 4LB
> UK
>
> Email: matt@biomedcentral.com