Dramatic Growth of Open Access March 31, 2013

HighlightsThis 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.