Let the competition begin! Dramatic Growth of Open Access 6/30/11

[Heather Morrison <hgmorris@sfu.ca>]

The June 30, 2011 issue of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access is 
now available, at: 
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/06/let-competition-begin- 
dramatic-growth.html

Highlights:

Celebrates the growth of open access in the area of the medical 
literature.  It was only a little more than a decade ago when the 
medline index was available only to subscribers.  Today, not only 
is PubMed available to all - so are more than 3.3 million free 
fulltext documents indexed in PubMed. 1,176 journals voluntarily 
participate in PubMed; on average, one new title is added per 
day.  More than half of these journals are open access.

COMPETITION YEARS HYPOTHESIS

Builds on the finding of Laakso et al of a tenfold increase in 
open access publishing from 1993 to 2009 
(http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0020961). 
Laakso et al theorized a threefold division during this time 
frame, the pioneering years, the innovation years, and the 
consolidation years. My hypothesis, based in part on the 
announcements in recent months by traditional publishers 
appearing to enter into serious competition in the OA arena 
(Springer Open - now with 50 journals; Wiley Open; Nature 
Communications, and today, Open Biology), is that we have already 
entered a new phase, which I am calling the competition years.

Selected numbers:
There are now more than 10,000 OJS installations worldwide, up 
from 9,000 last quarter (10% quarterly growth, 40% annual 
equivalent)

DOAJ 6,694 titles growth rate 4 titles / day

Electronic Journals Library (free journals of academic interest) 
29,000 titles, growth rate 11 titles / day

OpenDOAR 1,980 repositories growth rate 1 / day

BASE 29 million documents, growth rate 11,000 / day

ROARMAP 289 open access mandate policies

PubMedCentral:
1,176 journals actively participating; increase of 92 this 
quarter, 1 journal / day;
721 journals immediate free access; increase of 59 this quarter
616 all articles open access; increase of 51 this quarter

Heather G. Morrison
Doctoral Candidate, SFU School of Communication
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com