[GOAL] Re: Dramatic Growth of Open Access

[Éric Archambault]

Hi Heather

A lot of these number are just numbers, without much direct relevance to OA. Full-text document does not mean it is accessible for free. How many of the SSRN are available for free? Number of documents in the case of Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) is practically meaningless as all it refers to is the availability of metadata (1 document = 1 source of metadata, metadata can refers to photos, music partitions, and a few to OA peer-reviewed scientific papers, metadata can be of very low quality too). 

So considering that there is no control whatsoever for what is open access in many of these sources, how do you come to the conclusion that there is dramatic growth in OA beyond what we already know? What is the percentage of growth you are measuring? What is due to growth in instantly available OA, what is due to recent term dis-embargoing (usually as part of OA mandates that put pressure on publishers to dis-embargo paid-access articles)  and what is the longer-term dis-embargoing that creates a translation movement in the availability curve (the latter being a mix of green self-archiving and back-filling and longer term dis-embargoing by publishers)? As we have shown at Science-Metrix in our work for the European Commission, measuring the growth of OA is a complex issue and one has to describe with care what exactly is the aspect of OA growth being measured.

Cordially

Éric



-----Original Message-----
From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison
Sent: July-01-15 11:48 AM
To: Global Open Access List
Subject: [GOAL] Dramatic Growth of Open Access

The June 30 issue of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access is now available:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2015/06/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-june-30.html?m=1

Selected highlights:

Free full-text is now available from 15% of the 24 million citations in PubMed.

71% of the works indexed in PubMed funded by NIH link to free full-text (no filters on date of publication, type of work etc.)

DOAB lists more than a hundred publishers of scholarly open access books.

Social Sciences Research Network has more than half a million full text papers.

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine indexed over 75 million documents.

Due to a clean-up project, DOAJ journal numbers decreased slightly this quarter. The number of journals and articles searchable at the article level continues to grow.

best,

Heather Morrison
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