[GOAL] Correction and clarification: Dramatic Growth of Open Access March 31, 2013

[Heather Morrison]

Correction and clarification

The number of articles added by OASPA in 2012 was 81,780, not 25,788. This would place CC-BY growth in the same ballpark as arXiv, but still less than Highwire Press and much less than repository growth.  An anonymous commenter reports the split of DOAJ articles by license type. I am not able to replicate the search and do not have contact information for this person. If anyone can explain to me how I can do a DOAJ search by license without having a specific term that would be appreciated, as would contact information for the anonymous commenter. The chart above and data below have been updated to reflect this correction.

Clarification: the BASE documents number is used as a very rough surrogate of open access growth through repositories. Not all works in repositories are open access, and not all are scholarly works. However, I argue that the sheer size of the growth strongly suggests strong growth of open access in repositories. If only 1% of the 9.2 million document growth of BASE reflects open access scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles, that would still be close to 100 thousand articles added in 2012. This consideration is described in my rationale and method. Another important point is that open access repository growth isn't just about scholarly articles - this growth reflects a lot of grey literature, for example, reports and theses that are valuable scholarly works that generally received very little dissemination in previous years, increasingly research data, and the historical works are valuable primary documents for many scholars. This is a whole range of growth of open access materials that is taking place largely within the repository movement, and very little in open access publishing.

Thanks very much to Jyrki Ilva and "Alf" the anonymous commenter for this most welcome peer review. Can this now be considered a peer-reviewed blogpost?

The original post follows. 

The March 31, 2013 issue of Dramatic Growth of Open Access is now available.

Highlights

This issue features a comparison of open access growth including CC-BY article growth figures supplied by OASPA. In brief: for every CC-BY article addition tracked by OASPA, repositories around the world add 359 documents as found by a BASE search, DOAJ adds 10 articles that are not CC-BY licensed (90% of DOAJ article growth), arXiv and SSRN each add 3 documents, and the Internet Archive adds lots of texts, movies, sound recordings and concerts.  Recent research suggests that CC-BY is the preference of a small minority of scholars.

The top 10 growth figures by percentage for both this quarter and the past year are presented. Looking at percentage growth brings out substantial growth in initiatives with smaller numbers. Note that smaller numbers are not necessarily less significant. One open access funding agency mandate can mean free access to tens or even hundreds of thousands of articles, for example. Open access mandates are high on the list of percentage growth figures, including 26 funding agency OA mandates this quarter for a total of 80 and a growth rate of 48%. The Directory of Open Access Books is growing up leaps and bounds, or to be more specific added 13 publishers and 135 books this quarter. The usual suspects (Directory of Open Access Journals, PubMedCentral, and BASE) continue to rank highly on percentage comparisons. Highwire Press added a total of 20 totally free sites this past year for a total of 71, an impressive sixth place (not bad for an initiative that isn't focused on open access).

Kudos to DOAJ for hitting the 1 million article milestone. Bjork, Laakso, Welling and Paetau have issued a preprint of another major open access growth study, the Anatomy of Green Open Access, finding that the coverage of all journals articles as green open access is currently at 12%. Suber has posted additional figures and analysis and updated the open access by the numbers section of the Open Access Directory. New this issue is the amazing 281 billion web pages of the Internet Archive.

Full data, a word version of this commentary and jpg of the chart above are available in SFU SUMMIT.

Details:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2013/04/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-3013.html

Dr. Heather Morrison
Freedom for scholarship in the internet age
http://summit.sfu.ca/item/12537