[GOAL] Re: Dramatic Growth of Open Access

[Heather Morrison]

hi Eric,

The Dramatic Growth of Open Access uses a combination of surrogates and direct measures. The methods are available for download from the dataverse. Some examples of how this works:

The number of journals in DOAJ is a surrogate for fully open access journals. New journals that have not yet been vetted by DOAJ are not included, for example. This is a far from perfect measure, however I submit that the growth of fully open access journals listed in DOAJ over the past decade from a few hundred titles to well over ten thousand is a bona fide measure of substantial growth in OA publishing. This is also true of the growth in the number of books listed in DOAB, which is a vetted list. The number of OA book publishers is not a measure of OA works, rather an indication of capacity.

The free full text numbers from PubMed are indeed free of charge. If you find one of these citations you can click through to the full text; there is no paywall, no subscription is necessary.

The Bielefeld total number of publications is an indirect measure of the growth in content in repositories and success in repository harvesting. Even if this is indirect, the sheer size strongly suggests robust growth in free documents. Even if only 10% of the documents added to Bielefeld in the last quarter were free, that's still 360,000 documents.

The Dramatic Growth of Open Access series was never intended to be the one and only research project in this area. A number of researchers are looking at measures of scholarly production and percentage of OA content (Bjork, Solomon, Laasko, Crawford Spring to mind, apologies to others I should also remember). Many OA services do their own statistics, which I appreciate, draw from, and encourage. This series will not attempt to answer every question regarding the extent and growth anyone might have. If it does not answer the questions you consider important, please conduct or encourage the research you need. 

If you do not find the series useful or interesting, please don't feel obligated to read it. 

If anyone would like to discuss further please use the comments on IJPE. I doubt that discussion of methodological details is of broad interest to list members.

best,

Heather Morrison

> On Jul 1, 2015, at 12:45 PM, "Éric Archambault" <eric.archambault at science-metrix.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL at eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
> 
> _______________________________________________
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL at eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal