[GOAL] Dramatic Growth of Open Access September 30, 2017

[Éric Archambault]

Heather,

How do you derive this percentage? Also, are you using the same definition of document than BASE is using. It seems to me that BASE equates documents to metadata records, one for one. A metadata record could however refers to a photograph. So this estimate of 60% of "documents" means what? I'm sure there are more than 70 million free pictures on the internet. 

I think it's important to have definitions that are precise otherwise we can't know if a number is high or not, and we can't know if OA is experiencing a dramatic growth or a set back. I could say a document is a web page in which case there are several billion documents freely accessible on the Web. That said, this number is not highly useful as we have no idea what is being counted.

SO it's usually useful to consider a particular type of document, a scholarly article for example, or a scholarly book (which is not so easy to define in itself as the boundaries are extremely porous).

Our research at 1science and Science-Metrix indicates that there are more than 29 million articles published in peer-reviewed journals which can be downloaded for free on the public web (including part of ResearchGate, excluding all of Academia.edu and omitting SciHub). We have evidence there are more than 4 million papers published in peer-reviewed journals every year now (more than twice as many than currently indexed in the Web of Science), and 50% of these are freely downloadable after about 12 months.



Eric Archambault
C. 1.514.518.0823
eric.archambault at science-metrix.com
science-metrix.com  &  1science.com

-----Original Message-----
From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison
Sent: October 23, 2017 7:55 PM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) <goal at eprints.org>
Subject: [GOAL] Dramatic Growth of Open Access September 30, 2017

In brief:  best guesstimate - there are approximately 70 million OA documents today (subset of BASE's 115 million, about 60% OA), with OA documents at BASE growing at a rate of about 1,800 OA documents per day. Where do these come from? Thousands of OA archives - with PubMedCentral the largest by far at 4.5 million articles and active participation by thousands of journals. This quarter by the numbers the DOAJ team set a new record with a net growth of 689 journals of 7.7 titles per day. However, percentage wise the most remarkable quarterly growth was all about archives, with BioRxiv and SocRXiv topping the growth list by percentage, and as usual several sections of Internet Archive well up on the growth list. On an annual basis, Directory of Open Access Books was the fastest growing in terms of both # of books and # of publishers.

Details:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2017/10/dramatic-growth-of-open-access.htm

To download data:
https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/dataverse/dgoa

Happy Open Access Week!

--
Dr. Heather Morrison
Associate Professor | Professeure agrégé École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies University of Ottawa http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca



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