While many aspects of our lives and activities have slowed down during the COVID pandemic, this has not been the case with open access! The OA initiatives tracked through this series continue to show  strong growth on an annual and quarterly basis. Important milestones are being reached, and others will be coming soon.

Highlights

The Directory of Open Access Journals now lists over 15,000 fully open access, peer reviewed journals, having added 379 journals (> 4 per day) in the past quarter, and now provides searching for over 5 million articles at the article level. 

 A PubMed search for “cancer” limited to literature from the past 5 years now links to full-text for over 50% of the articles.

The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine now cross-searches over 8,000 repositories and will soon surpass the milestone of a quarter billion documents. 

Anyone worried about running out of cultural materials during the pandemic will be relieved to note that the Internet Archive has exceeded a milestone of 6 million movies in addition to over 27 million texts (plus audio, concerts, TV, collections, webpages, and software).

Analysis of quarterly and annual growth for 39 indicators from 10 services reflecting open access publishing and archiving (Internet Archive, Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, Directory of Open Access Books, bioRxiv, PubMedCentral, PubMed, SCOAP3, Directory of Open Access Journals, RePEC and arXiv) demonstrates ongoing robust growth beyond the baseline growth of scholarly journals and articles of 3 – 3.5 per year. Growth rates for these indicators ranged from 4% – 100% (doubling). 26 indicators had a growth rate of over 10%, 15 had a growth rate of over 20%, and 6 had a growth rate of over 40%. The full list can be found in this table.

Thank you to everyone in the open access movement for continuing the hard work that makes this growth possible.

The open data edition is available here:   

Morrison, Heather, 2020, “Dramatic Growth of Open Access Sept. 30, 2020”, https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/AVBOW6, Scholars Portal Dataverse, V2 

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series.  

Cite as: Morrison, H. (2020). Dramatic Growth of Open Access September 30, 2020. The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics https://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2020/10/dramatic-growth-of-open-access.html

While many aspects of our lives and activities have slowed down during the COVID pandemic, this has not been the case with open access! The OA initiatives tracked through this series continue to show  strong growth on an annual and quarterly basis. Important milestones are being reached, and others will be coming soon.

Highlights

The Directory of Open Access Journals now lists over 15,000 fully open access, peer reviewed journals, having added 379 journals (> 4 per day) in the past quarter, and now provides searching for over 5 million articles at the article level. 

 A PubMed search for “cancer” limited to literature from the past 5 years now links to full-text for over 50% of the articles.

The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine now cross-searches over 8,000 repositories and will soon surpass the milestone of a quarter billion documents. 

Anyone worried about running out of cultural materials during the pandemic will be relieved to note that the Internet Archive has exceeded a milestone of 6 million movies in addition to over 27 million texts (plus audio, concerts, TV, collections, webpages, and software).

Analysis of quarterly and annual growth for 39 indicators from 10 services reflecting open access publishing and archiving (Internet Archive, Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, Directory of Open Access Books, bioRxiv, PubMedCentral, PubMed, SCOAP3, Directory of Open Access Journals, RePEC and arXiv) demonstrates ongoing robust growth beyond the baseline growth of scholarly journals and articles of 3 – 3.5 per year. Growth rates for these indicators ranged from 4% – 100% (doubling). 26 indicators had a growth rate of over 10%, 15 had a growth rate of over 20%, and 6 had a growth rate of over 40%. The full list can be found in this table.

Thank you to everyone in the open access movement for continuing the hard work that makes this growth possible.

The open data edition is available here:   

Morrison, Heather, 2020, “Dramatic Growth of Open Access Sept. 30, 2020”, https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/AVBOW6, Scholars Portal Dataverse, V2 

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series.  

Cite as: Morrison, H. (2020). Dramatic Growth of Open Access September 30, 2020. The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics https://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2020/10/dramatic-growth-of-open-access.html

 2019 was another great year for open access! Of the 57 macro-level global OA indicators included in The Dramatic Growth of Open Access, 50 (88%) have growth rates that are higher than the long-term trend of background growth of scholarly journals and articles of 3 – 3.5% (Price, 1963; Mabe & Amin, 2001). More than half had growth rates of 10% or more, approximately triple the background growth rate, and 13 (nearly a quarter) had growth rates of over 20%.

Newer services have an advantage when growth rates are measured by percentage, and this is reflected in the over 20% 2019 growth category. The number of books in the Directory of Open Access Books tops the growth chart by nearly doubling (98% growth); bioRxiv follows with 74% growth. A few services showed remarkable growth on top of already substantial numbers. As usual, Internet Archive stands out with a 68% increase in audio recordings, a 58% increase in
collections, and a 48% increase in software. The number of articles searchable through DOAJ grew by over 900,000 in 2019 (25% growth). OpenDOAR is taking off in Asia, the Americas, Africa, and overall, with more than 20% growth in each of these categories, and SCOAP3 also grew by more than 20%.

The only area indicating some cause for concern is PubMedCentral. Although overall growth of free full-text from PubMed is robust. A keyword search for “cancer” yields about 7% – 10% more free full-text than a year ago. However, there was a slight decrease in the number of journals contributing to PMC with “all articles open access”, a drop of 138 journals or a 9% decrease. I have double-checked and the 2018 and 2019 PMC journal lists have been posted in the dataverse in case anyone else would like to check (method: sort the “deposit status” column and delete all Predecessor and No New Content journals, then sort the “Open Access” column and count the number of journals that say “All”. The number of journals submitting NIH portfolio articles only grew by only 1. Could this be backtracking on the part of publishers or perhaps technical work underway at NIH?

Full data is available in excel and csv format from: Morrison, Heather, 2020, “Dramatic Growth of Open Access Dec. 31, 2019”, https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/CHLOKU, Scholars Portal Dataverse, V1

References

 2019 was another great year for open access! Of the 57 macro-level global OA indicators included in The Dramatic Growth of Open Access, 50 (88%) have growth rates that are higher than the long-term trend of background growth of scholarly journals and articles of 3 – 3.5% (Price, 1963; Mabe & Amin, 2001). More than half had growth rates of 10% or more, approximately triple the background growth rate, and 13 (nearly a quarter) had growth rates of over 20%.

Newer services have an advantage when growth rates are measured by percentage, and this is reflected in the over 20% 2019 growth category. The number of books in the Directory of Open Access Books tops the growth chart by nearly doubling (98% growth); bioRxiv follows with 74% growth. A few services showed remarkable growth on top of already substantial numbers. As usual, Internet Archive stands out with a 68% increase in audio recordings, a 58% increase in
collections, and a 48% increase in software. The number of articles searchable through DOAJ grew by over 900,000 in 2019 (25% growth). OpenDOAR is taking off in Asia, the Americas, Africa, and overall, with more than 20% growth in each of these categories, and SCOAP3 also grew by more than 20%.

The only area indicating some cause for concern is PubMedCentral. Although overall growth of free full-text from PubMed is robust. A keyword search for “cancer” yields about 7% – 10% more free full-text than a year ago. However, there was a slight decrease in the number of journals contributing to PMC with “all articles open access”, a drop of 138 journals or a 9% decrease. I have double-checked and the 2018 and 2019 PMC journal lists have been posted in the dataverse in case anyone else would like to check (method: sort the “deposit status” column and delete all Predecessor and No New Content journals, then sort the “Open Access” column and count the number of journals that say “All”. The number of journals submitting NIH portfolio articles only grew by only 1. Could this be backtracking on the part of publishers or perhaps technical work underway at NIH?

Full data is available in excel and csv format from: Morrison, Heather, 2020, “Dramatic Growth of Open Access Dec. 31, 2019”, https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/CHLOKU, Scholars Portal Dataverse, V1

References

Highlights: this edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access features charts that illustrate that 2018 showed the strongest growth to date for open access by number of documents searchable through BASE, PubMedCentral, arXiv, DOAJ, texts added to Internet Archive, and journals added to DOAJ.

A Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) search encompasses over 19 million more items at the end of 2018 – about 60% or 11.4 million are open access. This brings the total documents searchable through BASE to close to 140 million (about 84 million open access)

PubMedCentral added 600,000 items in 2018, and surpassed a milestone of 5 millions items this year (now 5.2 million items)

arXiv added 140,000 items in 2018, bringing the total close to 1.5 million items.

The DOAJ article search grew by more than 800,000 articles in 2018, bringing the total number of articles searchable through DOAJ to about 3.6 million.

2018 was also the best year to date for DOAJ net journal growth. 1,707 journals were added for a current total of over 12,000 journals. Negative growth in 2016 illustrates the impact of the DOAJ weeding / re-application process.

4.5 million more texts are available through Internet Archive, bringing the total close to 20 million.

The following table provides data on total number of items as of December 31, 2018, growth in 2018 by number and percentage, in descending order by growth in percent. In interpreting percentage growth, consider total and numeric growth. bioRxiv nearly doubled in size this year, indicating a fairly new but healthy and rapidly growing service; but this reflects growth of about 20 thousand documents, a small fraction of the 600,000 items added by PMC for a 13% growth rate.

2018 growth (percent)		2018 total	2018 growth (number)
110%	bioRxiv # articles	39,570	20,748
74%	Internet Archives software	346,320	147,320
39%	SCOAP3 # article	25,163	7,121
30%	Internet Archive texts	19,570,789	4,570,789
30%	DOAJ searchable articles	3,624,154	832,453
29%	Internet Archive audio (recordings)	4,909,271	1,109,271
28%	DOAB # books	13,253	2,938
25%	Internet Archive collections	389,778	76,778
24%	Internet Archive videos (movies)	4,701,129	901,129
21%	DOAJ journals searchable at article level	9,479	1,670
16%	PubMed keyword search: cancer- last year – free fulltext	65,766	9,154
16%	DOAJ # journals	12,434	1,707
16%	BASE # documents	139,476,029	19,092,606
16%	Internet Archives television	1,733,000	233,000
15%	DOAB # publishers	285	38
14%	PMC journals some articles OA	758	94
13%	PMC # items	5,200,000	600,000
13%	RePEC books	39,086	4,449
12%	RePEc journal articles	1,785,335	193,994
12%	PubMed keyword search: cancer- last 2 years – free fulltext	153,875	16,026
11%	BASE # content providers	6,732	694
11%	Internet Archive webpages (in billions)	345	35
11%	RePEC online (fulltext) (downloadable as of March 2012)	2,528,831	249,692
11%	PubMed keyword search: cancer- last 5 years – free fulltext	391,691	37,230
10%	arXiv  http://arxiv.org/	1,482,864	140,139
10%	OpenDOAR http://www.opendoar.org/ # repositories	3,799	335
9%	RePEC chapters	51,278	4,360
9%	PMC journals selected articles	4,908	414
8%	RePEc working papers	858,360	64,235
8%	Total Policies (ROARMAP)	960	71
8%	PubMed keyword search: cancer – free fulltext	1,027,541	75,655
7%	PMC journals immediate free acccess	1,964	132
7%	DOAJ # countries	129	8
7%	PubMed keyword search: cancer – last year – all results	184,024	11,341
6%	PMC journals deposit all articles	2,217	124
6%	Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliotek – Electronic Journals Library  # journals that can be read free of charge	62,681	3,441
5%	PubMed keyword search: cancer – last 5 years – all results	839,960	43,565
5%	PMC journals actively participating	2,578	132
5%	PubMed keyword search: cancer – all results	3,784,638	192,126
5%	PubMed keyword search: cancer – last 2 years – all results	357,370	17,970
4%	RePEc software components	4,206	178
4%	Internet Archive live music (concerts)	192,534	7,534
3%	PMC journals all articles OA	1,529	51
3%	ROAR # repositories	4,735	138
2%	PMC journals NIH portfolio	335	6
-12%	Internet Archive images	3,247,253	-452,747

Full data can be downloaded from the Dramatic Growth of Open Access dataverse: https://hdl.handle.net/10864/10660. This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series. From 2004 – June 30, 2018 the series was posted on a quarterly basis. As of September 30, 2018, I continue to gather data quarterly but plan to release the series less frequently, most likely on an annual basis.

The March 31, 2019 full data is available for download here. 

Highlights: this edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access features charts that illustrate that 2018 showed the strongest growth to date for open access by number of documents searchable through BASE, PubMedCentral, arXiv, DOAJ, texts added to Internet Archive, and journals added to DOAJ.

A Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) search encompasses over 19 million more items at the end of 2018 – about 60% or 11.4 million are open access. This brings the total documents searchable through BASE to close to 140 million (about 84 million open access)

PubMedCentral added 600,000 items in 2018, and surpassed a milestone of 5 millions items this year (now 5.2 million items)

arXiv added 140,000 items in 2018, bringing the total close to 1.5 million items.

The DOAJ article search grew by more than 800,000 articles in 2018, bringing the total number of articles searchable through DOAJ to about 3.6 million.

2018 was also the best year to date for DOAJ net journal growth. 1,707 journals were added for a current total of over 12,000 journals. Negative growth in 2016 illustrates the impact of the DOAJ weeding / re-application process.

4.5 million more texts are available through Internet Archive, bringing the total close to 20 million.

The following table provides data on total number of items as of December 31, 2018, growth in 2018 by number and percentage, in descending order by growth in percent. In interpreting percentage growth, consider total and numeric growth. bioRxiv nearly doubled in size this year, indicating a fairly new but healthy and rapidly growing service; but this reflects growth of about 20 thousand documents, a small fraction of the 600,000 items added by PMC for a 13% growth rate.

2018 growth (percent)		2018 total	2018 growth (number)
110%	bioRxiv # articles	39,570	20,748
74%	Internet Archives software	346,320	147,320
39%	SCOAP3 # article	25,163	7,121
30%	Internet Archive texts	19,570,789	4,570,789
30%	DOAJ searchable articles	3,624,154	832,453
29%	Internet Archive audio (recordings)	4,909,271	1,109,271
28%	DOAB # books	13,253	2,938
25%	Internet Archive collections	389,778	76,778
24%	Internet Archive videos (movies)	4,701,129	901,129
21%	DOAJ journals searchable at article level	9,479	1,670
16%	PubMed keyword search: cancer- last year – free fulltext	65,766	9,154
16%	DOAJ # journals	12,434	1,707
16%	BASE # documents	139,476,029	19,092,606
16%	Internet Archives television	1,733,000	233,000
15%	DOAB # publishers	285	38
14%	PMC journals some articles OA	758	94
13%	PMC # items	5,200,000	600,000
13%	RePEC books	39,086	4,449
12%	RePEc journal articles	1,785,335	193,994
12%	PubMed keyword search: cancer- last 2 years – free fulltext	153,875	16,026
11%	BASE # content providers	6,732	694
11%	Internet Archive webpages (in billions)	345	35
11%	RePEC online (fulltext) (downloadable as of March 2012)	2,528,831	249,692
11%	PubMed keyword search: cancer- last 5 years – free fulltext	391,691	37,230
10%	arXiv  http://arxiv.org/	1,482,864	140,139
10%	OpenDOAR http://www.opendoar.org/ # repositories	3,799	335
9%	RePEC chapters	51,278	4,360
9%	PMC journals selected articles	4,908	414
8%	RePEc working papers	858,360	64,235
8%	Total Policies (ROARMAP)	960	71
8%	PubMed keyword search: cancer – free fulltext	1,027,541	75,655
7%	PMC journals immediate free acccess	1,964	132
7%	DOAJ # countries	129	8
7%	PubMed keyword search: cancer – last year – all results	184,024	11,341
6%	PMC journals deposit all articles	2,217	124
6%	Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliotek – Electronic Journals Library  # journals that can be read free of charge	62,681	3,441
5%	PubMed keyword search: cancer – last 5 years – all results	839,960	43,565
5%	PMC journals actively participating	2,578	132
5%	PubMed keyword search: cancer – all results	3,784,638	192,126
5%	PubMed keyword search: cancer – last 2 years – all results	357,370	17,970
4%	RePEc software components	4,206	178
4%	Internet Archive live music (concerts)	192,534	7,534
3%	PMC journals all articles OA	1,529	51
3%	ROAR # repositories	4,735	138
2%	PMC journals NIH portfolio	335	6
-12%	Internet Archive images	3,247,253	-452,747

Full data can be downloaded from the Dramatic Growth of Open Access dataverse: https://hdl.handle.net/10864/10660. This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series. From 2004 – June 30, 2018 the series was posted on a quarterly basis. As of September 30, 2018, I continue to gather data quarterly but plan to release the series less frequently, most likely on an annual basis.

Congratulations to DOAJ for recently surpassing a milestone of over 3 million articles searchable at the article level!

The outstanding growth story by percentage for the second quarter of 2018 was bioRxiv. From March 31 – June 30, bioRxiv grew by 5,290 articles for a total of 28,070 articles, a growth rate of 23% for this quarter and 129% (more than doubled) over the past year.

38 of the limited set of indicators that I track had growth rates this quarter of 2% or more, equivalent of 8% annual growth, more than double the base rate of growth of scholarly journals and articles of 3 – 3.5% (de Solla Price, 1963; Mabe & Amin, 2001).

My best guesstimates of “how much open access there is” are based on the meta-search tool BASE (the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine). BASE harvests metadata from repositories and open access journals using OAI-PMH. BASE now contains over 130 million documents from 6,444 sources. About 60% are open access; collectively, the OA movement now makes available about 78 million open access documents. This quarter, BASE grew by over 13 million documents for a quarterly growth rate of 11%.

The Internet Archive as usual showed robust growth in a number of services – software components grew by 11% this quarter for a total of just over 230,000; audio recordings grew by 8% and are now over 8.8 million; collections also grew by 8% and are now over 325,000; close to a million texts were added this quarter for a growth rate of 6% and a total of over 16.5 million texts; there are close to 200,000 more videos for a growth rate of 5%; webpages and television each grew by 3%. There was a decrease in the number of images this quarter, down 18% or close to 700,000 images (does anyone know why? – if so please comment), in contrast with the annual growth for images from last year of 115% (more than double).

For OA publishing, this quarter SCOAP3 grew by 1,772 documents or 9%. The Directory of Open Access Books added 826 books and 17 publishers, 7% growth this quarter for both indicators. RePEC added over 2,000 books for a quarterly growth rate of 6% (journal articles and total downloadable items each grew by 2%). DOAJ added about 7 new titles per day  this quarter for a total net growth of 624 journals, a growth rate of 6%; DOAJ also by 6% in the number of journals and articles searchable at the article level, and as noted above, DOAJ surpassed a milestone of over 3 million articles searchable at the article level. DOAJ also added 4 countries this quarter.

A PubMed keyword search for “cancer” limited to the last year returned 5% more free fulltext this quarter. However, the same search with no date limit resulted in a slight (1%) decrease in free fulltext (does anyone know why? If so please comment). The same search with date limits of 5 years or 2 years result in a 2% increase in free fulltext. The number of items in PubMedCentral grew by 4% this quarter, adding 200,000 items for a total of 4.9 million (watch for the 5 million milestone coming soon). PMC journal participation grew by 2% this quarter on several indicators: the number of journals actively participating in PMC, the number of journals providing immediate free access, the number of journals depositing all content in PMC, and the number of journals that deposit some content in PMC.

arXiv grew by 3%; ROARMAP OA policy listings by 2%, as did the total number of journals that can be read free of charge listed by the Electronic Journals Library.

Congratulations and thank you to every one of the thousands of journals, repositories, publishers, and related services, and the millions of authors choosing to make your work open access.  Please accept my apologies for not tracking everyone, due to my human limitations. I encourage everyone to applaud and celebrate your own, and your neighbour’s, accomplishments and milestones – and share them with everyone in the OA movement by joining the OATP tag team.

To download the data go to the DGOA dataverse.

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

References

Congratulations to DOAJ for recently surpassing a milestone of over 3 million articles searchable at the article level!

The outstanding growth story by percentage for the second quarter of 2018 was bioRxiv. From March 31 – June 30, bioRxiv grew by 5,290 articles for a total of 28,070 articles, a growth rate of 23% for this quarter and 129% (more than doubled) over the past year.

38 of the limited set of indicators that I track had growth rates this quarter of 2% or more, equivalent of 8% annual growth, more than double the base rate of growth of scholarly journals and articles of 3 – 3.5% (de Solla Price, 1963; Mabe & Amin, 2001).

My best guesstimates of “how much open access there is” are based on the meta-search tool BASE (the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine). BASE harvests metadata from repositories and open access journals using OAI-PMH. BASE now contains over 130 million documents from 6,444 sources. About 60% are open access; collectively, the OA movement now makes available about 78 million open access documents. This quarter, BASE grew by over 13 million documents for a quarterly growth rate of 11%.

The Internet Archive as usual showed robust growth in a number of services – software components grew by 11% this quarter for a total of just over 230,000; audio recordings grew by 8% and are now over 8.8 million; collections also grew by 8% and are now over 325,000; close to a million texts were added this quarter for a growth rate of 6% and a total of over 16.5 million texts; there are close to 200,000 more videos for a growth rate of 5%; webpages and television each grew by 3%. There was a decrease in the number of images this quarter, down 18% or close to 700,000 images (does anyone know why? – if so please comment), in contrast with the annual growth for images from last year of 115% (more than double).

For OA publishing, this quarter SCOAP3 grew by 1,772 documents or 9%. The Directory of Open Access Books added 826 books and 17 publishers, 7% growth this quarter for both indicators. RePEC added over 2,000 books for a quarterly growth rate of 6% (journal articles and total downloadable items each grew by 2%). DOAJ added about 7 new titles per day  this quarter for a total net growth of 624 journals, a growth rate of 6%; DOAJ also by 6% in the number of journals and articles searchable at the article level, and as noted above, DOAJ surpassed a milestone of over 3 million articles searchable at the article level. DOAJ also added 4 countries this quarter.

A PubMed keyword search for “cancer” limited to the last year returned 5% more free fulltext this quarter. However, the same search with no date limit resulted in a slight (1%) decrease in free fulltext (does anyone know why? If so please comment). The same search with date limits of 5 years or 2 years result in a 2% increase in free fulltext. The number of items in PubMedCentral grew by 4% this quarter, adding 200,000 items for a total of 4.9 million (watch for the 5 million milestone coming soon). PMC journal participation grew by 2% this quarter on several indicators: the number of journals actively participating in PMC, the number of journals providing immediate free access, the number of journals depositing all content in PMC, and the number of journals that deposit some content in PMC.

arXiv grew by 3%; ROARMAP OA policy listings by 2%, as did the total number of journals that can be read free of charge listed by the Electronic Journals Library.

Congratulations and thank you to every one of the thousands of journals, repositories, publishers, and related services, and the millions of authors choosing to make your work open access.  Please accept my apologies for not tracking everyone, due to my human limitations. I encourage everyone to applaud and celebrate your own, and your neighbour’s, accomplishments and milestones – and share them with everyone in the OA movement by joining the OATP tag team.

To download the data go to the DGOA dataverse.

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

References

As usual open access is showing strong growth in many directions; more open access archives, documents, journals, articles, and books. This quarter focuses on the large number of indicators of growth beyond the usual background growth of scholarly journals and articles of 3 – 3.5% per year. Newcomer bioRxiv, with 21% growth this quarter (equivalent to 84% annual growth) is far above this background growth. This quarter, DOAJ added a net total of 378 journals, or more than 4 journals per day, for a total of 11,105 journals. The number of journals searchable at the article level has increased by 236 for a total of 8,045 journals. The number of articles searchable at the article level is just under 3 million.  The number of documents searchable through BASE grew by 3.5 million for a total of just under 24 million (about 60% of these, over 14 million, are open access). BASE added 121 content providers for a total of over 600 content providers. The percentage of PubMed records for a search for “cancer” that retrieve full-text is 27% overall, with a high of 45% for records published in the last 5 years. The percentage of full-text retrieval is rising at a steady rate.

The overall growth rate for scholarly articles and journals has been fairly steady over the past few centuries, in the range of 3 – 3.5% growth annually (Price, 1963; Mabe & Amin, 2001). As noted in the following chart, in the past quarter alone there have been 43 indicators of growth above that level, at least 1% in the quarter (equivalent of 4% annually). 
 

Quarterly growth percentage	Item	03/31/18	Quarterly growth numeric
21%	bioRxiv articles	22,780	3,958
13%	DOAB books	11,685	1,370
10%	SCOAP3 article	19,778	1,736
9%	Internet Archive Video	4,128,556	328,556
8%	Internet Archive Collections	338,578	25,578
8%	Internet Archive Recordings	4,094,506	294,506
7%	Internet Archive Television	1,607,000	107,000
7%	DOAJ # of articles searchable at article level	2,984,612	192,911
6%	DOAB # publishers	261	14
5%	PubMed keyword search: cancer- last year – free fulltext	59,695	3,083
5%	Internet Archive Texts	15,760,271	760,271
5%	RePEC chapters	49,294	2,376
5%	Internet Archive Webpages (billions)	325	15
4%	Internet Archive Images	3,865,878	165,878
4%	RePEc journal articles	1,659,120	67,779
4%	PubMed keyword search: cancer- last 5 years – free fulltext	367,509	13,048
4%	Internet Archive Software	206,098	7,098
4%	DOAJ # journals	11,105	378
3%	PubMed keyword search: cancer- last 2 years – free fulltext	142,572	4,723
3%	RePEC downloadable articles	2,354,480	75,341
3%	ROARMAP # OA policies	916	27
3%	DOAJ # articles searchable at article level	8,045	236
3%	PubMed keyword search: cancer – free fulltext	980,174	28,288
3%	BASE # documents	123,932,954	3,549,531
3%	PMC journals with some articles open access	682	18
2%	DOAJ # countries	124	3
2%	arXiv  articles	1,375,438	32,713
2%	PMC select deposit journals	4,588	94
2%	BASE # content providers	6,159	121
2%	RePEC books	35,263	626
2%	PubMed keyword search: cancer – last 5 years – all results	810,024	13,629
2%	RePEc working papers	807,624	13,499
2%	OpenDOAR # repositories	3,517	53
2%	Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliotek – # journals that can be read free of charge	60,129	889
1%	chapters (OECD ilibrary)	60,300	840
1%	PubMed keyword search: cancer – all results	3,639,629	47,117
1%	PMC journals with immediate free access	1,852	20
1%	ROAR # repositories	4,643	46
1%	RePEc software components	4,068	40
1%	OECD ilibrary tables and graphs	175,500	1,650
1%	PMC actively participating journals	2,466	20
1%	OECD ilibrary working papers	5,600	40
1%	PMC journals that submit all articles	2,108	15

References

As usual open access is showing strong growth in many directions; more open access archives, documents, journals, articles, and books. This quarter focuses on the large number of indicators of growth beyond the usual background growth of scholarly journals and articles of 3 – 3.5% per year. Newcomer bioRxiv, with 21% growth this quarter (equivalent to 84% annual growth) is far above this background growth. This quarter, DOAJ added a net total of 378 journals, or more than 4 journals per day, for a total of 11,105 journals. The number of journals searchable at the article level has increased by 236 for a total of 8,045 journals. The number of articles searchable at the article level is just under 3 million.  The number of documents searchable through BASE grew by 3.5 million for a total of just under 24 million (about 60% of these, over 14 million, are open access). BASE added 121 content providers for a total of over 600 content providers. The percentage of PubMed records for a search for “cancer” that retrieve full-text is 27% overall, with a high of 45% for records published in the last 5 years. The percentage of full-text retrieval is rising at a steady rate.

The overall growth rate for scholarly articles and journals has been fairly steady over the past few centuries, in the range of 3 – 3.5% growth annually (Price, 1963; Mabe & Amin, 2001). As noted in the following chart, in the past quarter alone there have been 43 indicators of growth above that level, at least 1% in the quarter (equivalent of 4% annually). 
 

Quarterly growth percentage	Item	03/31/18	Quarterly growth numeric
21%	bioRxiv articles	22,780	3,958
13%	DOAB books	11,685	1,370
10%	SCOAP3 article	19,778	1,736
9%	Internet Archive Video	4,128,556	328,556
8%	Internet Archive Collections	338,578	25,578
8%	Internet Archive Recordings	4,094,506	294,506
7%	Internet Archive Television	1,607,000	107,000
7%	DOAJ # of articles searchable at article level	2,984,612	192,911
6%	DOAB # publishers	261	14
5%	PubMed keyword search: cancer- last year – free fulltext	59,695	3,083
5%	Internet Archive Texts	15,760,271	760,271
5%	RePEC chapters	49,294	2,376
5%	Internet Archive Webpages (billions)	325	15
4%	Internet Archive Images	3,865,878	165,878
4%	RePEc journal articles	1,659,120	67,779
4%	PubMed keyword search: cancer- last 5 years – free fulltext	367,509	13,048
4%	Internet Archive Software	206,098	7,098
4%	DOAJ # journals	11,105	378
3%	PubMed keyword search: cancer- last 2 years – free fulltext	142,572	4,723
3%	RePEC downloadable articles	2,354,480	75,341
3%	ROARMAP # OA policies	916	27
3%	DOAJ # articles searchable at article level	8,045	236
3%	PubMed keyword search: cancer – free fulltext	980,174	28,288
3%	BASE # documents	123,932,954	3,549,531
3%	PMC journals with some articles open access	682	18
2%	DOAJ # countries	124	3
2%	arXiv  articles	1,375,438	32,713
2%	PMC select deposit journals	4,588	94
2%	BASE # content providers	6,159	121
2%	RePEC books	35,263	626
2%	PubMed keyword search: cancer – last 5 years – all results	810,024	13,629
2%	RePEc working papers	807,624	13,499
2%	OpenDOAR # repositories	3,517	53
2%	Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliotek – # journals that can be read free of charge	60,129	889
1%	chapters (OECD ilibrary)	60,300	840
1%	PubMed keyword search: cancer – all results	3,639,629	47,117
1%	PMC journals with immediate free access	1,852	20
1%	ROAR # repositories	4,643	46
1%	RePEc software components	4,068	40
1%	OECD ilibrary tables and graphs	175,500	1,650
1%	PMC actively participating journals	2,466	20
1%	OECD ilibrary working papers	5,600	40
1%	PMC journals that submit all articles	2,108	15

References

Highlights

As usual the open access movement has much to celebrate as 2017 draws to a close, and the whole world has much to look forward to from open access in 2018. As of today there are 4.6 million articles in PubMedCentral, thanks in large measure to constantly increasing participation by scholarly journals; sometime in 2018 this is likely to exceed 5 million. DOAJ added a net 1,272 journals (3.5 / day) and showed even stronger growth in article searchability; a DOAJ milestone of 3 million searchable articles in likely to come in 2018. The Directory of Open Access Books nearly doubled in size and now has more than 10,000 books from 247 publishers. Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, the best surrogate for overall growth, continues to amaze with over 120 million documents, growth of 17.3 million in 2017, a 17% growth rate on a very substantial base; a 20% growth in content providers is an indication of the overall growth of the repository movement. arXiv’s growth rate was 10% while newcomer arXiv clones socRxiv grew by 187% and bioRxiv by 151%. REPEC grew by 13%, SCOAP3 by 32%. Internet Archive grew by 31 billion web pages, 4 million texts, 2.4 million images, 800,000 movies, and 600,000 audio recordings. Following are selected details indicating the content numbers at the end of 2017, 2017 growth by number, percentage, and where warranted, by day.

Full data can be downloaded from here: https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/dataverse/dgoa

Details (selected)

Totals are from December 31, 2017. Annual growth: Dec. 31, 2017 – Dec. 31, 2017

Free journals

Directory of Open Access Journals

10,727 journals

• 2017 growth: 1,272 journals (3.5 / day), growth rate 13%

7,809 journals searchable at article level

• 2017 growth:  1,175 (3.2 / day), growth rate 18%

2,791,701 articles searchable at article level

• 2017 growth: 391,443 (1,072 / day), growth rate 16%

Milestone to watch for in 2018: 3 million articles searchable at article level

Electronic Journals Library 

59,240 journals that can be read free of charge (2017 growth: 3,678 (10 / day), 7% growth)

Free books

OECD ilibrary

11,690 e-book titles (2017 growth 640 (2 / day), growth rate 6%

Directory of Open Access Books

 10,315 academic peer-reviewed books, 247 publishers

• 2017 growth: 4,713 (13 / day), growth rate 84%, increase of 80 publishers

See also Internet Archive below

Repositories
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine

120,383,423 documents

• 2017 growth: 17.3 million documents (47,000 / day), growth rate 17%

6,038 content providers

• 2017 growth: 1,015 (3 / day), growth rate 20%

OpenDOAR

3,464 repositories — 2017 growth 179, (.5 / day), growth rate 5%

Registry of Open Access Repositories

4,597 repositories – 2017 growth 232, 1 / day), growth rate 5%

PubMedCentral

4.6 million items – 2017 growth 500,000, (1,370 / day), growth rate 12%

2,446 journals actively participating in PMC – 2017 growth 120, growth rate 5%

1,832 journals in PMC with immediate free access – 2017 growth 112, growth rate 7%

1,478 journals in PMC with all articles open access – 2017 growth 52, growth rate 4%

664 journals in PMC with some articles open access – 2017 growth 95, growth rate 17%

2,093 full participation journals (deposit ALL articles in PMC) – 2017 growth 120, growth rate 6%

329 NIH portfolio journals (deposit NIH funded article in PMC) – 2017 growth 5, growth rate 2%

4,494 selective deposit (deposit some articles in PMC) – 2017 growth 421 (1 / day), growth rate 10%

33% of articles keyword “cancer” freefulltext within 1 year of publication (41% at 2 years, 45% at 5 years, 26% with no date limiter)

Milestone to watch for in 2018: 5 million items

arXiv

1,342,725 items – 2017 growth 123,501 (338 / day), growth rate 10%

SocArXiv

1,814 preprints – 2017 growth 1,183 (3 / day), growth rate 187%

bioRxiv

18,822 article – 2017 growth 11,322 (31 / day), growth rate 151%

RePEC

2,279,139 downloadable items – 2017 growth 257,605 (706 / day), growth rate 13%

Internet Archive

310 billion webpages – 2017 growth 31 billion webpages (85,000 / day), growth rate 11%

3.8 million video (movies) – 2017 growth 800,000 (2,192 / day), growth rate 27%

3.8 million audio recordings – 2017 growth 600,000 (1,644 / day), growth rate 19%

15,000,000 texts – 2017 growth: 4 million (11,000 / day), growth rate 36%

3.7 million images – 2017 growth: 2.4 million (6,575 / day), growth rate 185%

SCOAP3

18,042 articles – 2017 growth: 4,410 (12 / day), growth rate 32%

 This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

Highlights

As usual the open access movement has much to celebrate as 2017 draws to a close, and the whole world has much to look forward to from open access in 2018. As of today there are 4.6 million articles in PubMedCentral, thanks in large measure to constantly increasing participation by scholarly journals; sometime in 2018 this is likely to exceed 5 million. DOAJ added a net 1,272 journals (3.5 / day) and showed even stronger growth in article searchability; a DOAJ milestone of 3 million searchable articles in likely to come in 2018. The Directory of Open Access Books nearly doubled in size and now has more than 10,000 books from 247 publishers. Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, the best surrogate for overall growth, continues to amaze with over 120 million documents, growth of 17.3 million in 2017, a 17% growth rate on a very substantial base; a 20% growth in content providers is an indication of the overall growth of the repository movement. arXiv’s growth rate was 10% while newcomer arXiv clones socRxiv grew by 187% and bioRxiv by 151%. REPEC grew by 13%, SCOAP3 by 32%. Internet Archive grew by 31 billion web pages, 4 million texts, 2.4 million images, 800,000 movies, and 600,000 audio recordings. Following are selected details indicating the content numbers at the end of 2017, 2017 growth by number, percentage, and where warranted, by day.

Full data can be downloaded from here: https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/dataverse/dgoa

Details (selected)

Totals are from December 31, 2017. Annual growth: Dec. 31, 2017 – Dec. 31, 2017

Free journals

Directory of Open Access Journals

10,727 journals

• 2017 growth: 1,272 journals (3.5 / day), growth rate 13%

7,809 journals searchable at article level

• 2017 growth:  1,175 (3.2 / day), growth rate 18%

2,791,701 articles searchable at article level

• 2017 growth: 391,443 (1,072 / day), growth rate 16%

Milestone to watch for in 2018: 3 million articles searchable at article level

Electronic Journals Library 

59,240 journals that can be read free of charge (2017 growth: 3,678 (10 / day), 7% growth)

Free books

OECD ilibrary

11,690 e-book titles (2017 growth 640 (2 / day), growth rate 6%

Directory of Open Access Books

 10,315 academic peer-reviewed books, 247 publishers

• 2017 growth: 4,713 (13 / day), growth rate 84%, increase of 80 publishers

See also Internet Archive below

Repositories
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine

120,383,423 documents

• 2017 growth: 17.3 million documents (47,000 / day), growth rate 17%

6,038 content providers

• 2017 growth: 1,015 (3 / day), growth rate 20%

OpenDOAR

3,464 repositories — 2017 growth 179, (.5 / day), growth rate 5%

Registry of Open Access Repositories

4,597 repositories – 2017 growth 232, 1 / day), growth rate 5%

PubMedCentral

4.6 million items – 2017 growth 500,000, (1,370 / day), growth rate 12%

2,446 journals actively participating in PMC – 2017 growth 120, growth rate 5%

1,832 journals in PMC with immediate free access – 2017 growth 112, growth rate 7%

1,478 journals in PMC with all articles open access – 2017 growth 52, growth rate 4%

664 journals in PMC with some articles open access – 2017 growth 95, growth rate 17%

2,093 full participation journals (deposit ALL articles in PMC) – 2017 growth 120, growth rate 6%

329 NIH portfolio journals (deposit NIH funded article in PMC) – 2017 growth 5, growth rate 2%

4,494 selective deposit (deposit some articles in PMC) – 2017 growth 421 (1 / day), growth rate 10%

33% of articles keyword “cancer” freefulltext within 1 year of publication (41% at 2 years, 45% at 5 years, 26% with no date limiter)

Milestone to watch for in 2018: 5 million items

arXiv

1,342,725 items – 2017 growth 123,501 (338 / day), growth rate 10%

SocArXiv

1,814 preprints – 2017 growth 1,183 (3 / day), growth rate 187%

bioRxiv

18,822 article – 2017 growth 11,322 (31 / day), growth rate 151%

RePEC

2,279,139 downloadable items – 2017 growth 257,605 (706 / day), growth rate 13%

Internet Archive

310 billion webpages – 2017 growth 31 billion webpages (85,000 / day), growth rate 11%

3.8 million video (movies) – 2017 growth 800,000 (2,192 / day), growth rate 27%

3.8 million audio recordings – 2017 growth 600,000 (1,644 / day), growth rate 19%

15,000,000 texts – 2017 growth: 4 million (11,000 / day), growth rate 36%

3.7 million images – 2017 growth: 2.4 million (6,575 / day), growth rate 185%

SCOAP3

18,042 articles – 2017 growth: 4,410 (12 / day), growth rate 32%

 This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

Correction: DOAJ will soon surpass 2.5 million articles, not a quarter of a billion as originally reported. 

Highlights

Open access continues to demonstrate robust growth on a global scale, in terms of works that are made available open access, ongoing growth in infrastructure (new repositories, journals, book publishers), strong growth for new initiatives such as SocArxiv, BioRxiv, the Directory of Open Access Books, SCOAP3, as well as ongoing strong growth in established services such as BASE, PubMed / PubMedCentral, Internet Archive (check out the new Collections including a Trump archive and FactChecker), DOAJ (almost 2.5 million articles searchable at the article level), RePEC and arXiv. Ongoing growth in infrastructure and OA policy give every reason to expect this growth to be ongoing.

Open Data Version

Morrison, Heather, 2014, “Dramatic Growth of Open Access”, hdl:10864/10660, Scholars Portal Dataverse, V17,

Details

This edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access highlights two of the new kids on the OA block – SocArxiv and BioRxiv, modeled on early OA success story arXiv, topping the quarterly growth by percentage with percentage growth of about 30% each! SocArxiv now has 1,200 documents and BioRxiv 12,800.

Similarly, a relative newcomer, the Directory of Open Access Books, is in both first and second place for annual growth by percentage with 68% growth for OA books and 40% of OA publishers in the past year for a total of 8,172 open access books and 217 OA book publishers.

SCOAP3, a global initiative to transform high-energy physics publishing to open access, is showing remarkable growth, 39% in the last year and 8% in the last quarter for a total of 15,790 articles funded.

To celebrate the growth of all OA services two pictures are presented of the growth of the largest collective OA search engine that I am aware of. Together, the 5,000 content providers who contribute metadata to the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) have made available over 112 million documents. Around 60% of these are open access, so the number of OA documents in the world can be said to be somewhere about 67 million. BASE also posts their own online statistics table and chart – check it out here.

I wish I had the time to applaud and celebrate the growth of each and every OA service, but with 5,000 services contributing to BASE (and others that don’t), if I worked on this 365 days a year I would have to cover 14 initiatives every day. So please feel free to help out by applauding and celebrating the services most relevant to you – the journals in your discipline, your institutional repository, the services you find most helpful to search.

Below you will find tables listing the top services by quarterly (5% or more) and annual growth (10% or more). For the full numbers download the open data version (link above). As usual Internet Archive is well represented, with 5 items in the list of the top 13 services by quarterly growth and the top 18 services by annual growth. Internet Archive also offers 2 intriguing new services under Collections – a Trump Archive with over a thousand videos and a Fact Checker collection with over 400 items, available at https://archive.org/details/tvhttps://archive.org/details/tv

Of course PubMed and PubMedCentral are up there in the growth charts, in this quarter for total number of items (5% quarterly growth) as well as what looks (to me) like hesitant new steps by a substantial number of journals, with a 26% increase in the number of contributing journals that provide some OA and a 14% increase in the number of journals that provide OA to selected articles. The number of journals providing immediate free access and/or all articles open access continues to increase, so this is clearly growth, not backsliding.

DOAJ is included in the top growth services with 14% growth in the number of articles searchable at article level. DOAJ now has over 2.49 million articles searchable at the article level and should soon surpass 2.5 million articles.

arXiv and RePEC are on the list for strong growth in articles, and ROARMAP for growth in OA policies.
 

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Quarterly growth (percentage)		June 2017
32%	SocArxiv preprints	1,200
29%	BioRxiv all articles	12,280
18%	# of academic peer-reviewed books (DOAB)	8,172
18%	# publishers (DOAB)	217
8%	SCOAP3 articles	15,790
8%	Internet Archive Software	178,635
7%	Video (movies)  (Internet Archive)	3,437,542
7%	Texts  (Internet Archive)	12,821,051
5%	Images (Internet Archive)	1,476,743
5%	# of content providers (BASE)	5,621
5%	Audio (recordings)  (Internet Archive)	3,477,033
5%	Webpages (Internet Archive) (in billions)	298
5%	PubMedCentral (number of items)	4,400,000

 
-->

Annual growth (percentage)		06/30/17
68%	# of academic peer-reviewed books (DOAB)	8,172
40%	# publishers (DOAB)	217
39%	SCOAP3 number of archives	15,790
34%	Video (movies)  (Internet Archive)	3,437,542
33%	Internet Archive: Software	178,635
29%	# of content providers (BASE)	5,621
27%	Texts  (Internet Archive)	12,821,051
26%	PMC journals some OA	609
25%	Internet Archive: Images	1,476,743
20%	# of documents (BASE)	112,458,360
17%	Audio (recordings)  (Internet Archive)	3,477,033
17%	RePEc journal articles	1,491,037
14%	# of articles searchable at article level (DOAJ)	2,493,835
14%	PMC select deposit journals	4,296
13%	RePEC downloadable	2,143,844
13%	Total Policies (ROARMAP)	872
13%	PMC # items	4,400,000
10%	arXiv  http://arxiv.org/	1,278,739

 This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series Feel free to copy and share - with love.  Note that images are compressed by the software to reduce file size, and they are also quickly outdated. You are welcome to use the images, but my recommendation is to download the data and make your own graphics. It's easier than you think with tools like modern spreadsheet software.
 

Correction: DOAJ will soon surpass 2.5 million articles, not a quarter of a billion as originally reported. 

Highlights

Open access continues to demonstrate robust growth on a global scale, in terms of works that are made available open access, ongoing growth in infrastructure (new repositories, journals, book publishers), strong growth for new initiatives such as SocArxiv, BioRxiv, the Directory of Open Access Books, SCOAP3, as well as ongoing strong growth in established services such as BASE, PubMed / PubMedCentral, Internet Archive (check out the new Collections including a Trump archive and FactChecker), DOAJ (almost 2.5 million articles searchable at the article level), RePEC and arXiv. Ongoing growth in infrastructure and OA policy give every reason to expect this growth to be ongoing.

Open Data Version

Morrison, Heather, 2014, “Dramatic Growth of Open Access”, hdl:10864/10660, Scholars Portal Dataverse, V17,

Details

This edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access highlights two of the new kids on the OA block – SocArxiv and BioRxiv, modeled on early OA success story arXiv, topping the quarterly growth by percentage with percentage growth of about 30% each! SocArxiv now has 1,200 documents and BioRxiv 12,800.

Similarly, a relative newcomer, the Directory of Open Access Books, is in both first and second place for annual growth by percentage with 68% growth for OA books and 40% of OA publishers in the past year for a total of 8,172 open access books and 217 OA book publishers.

SCOAP3, a global initiative to transform high-energy physics publishing to open access, is showing remarkable growth, 39% in the last year and 8% in the last quarter for a total of 15,790 articles funded.

To celebrate the growth of all OA services two pictures are presented of the growth of the largest collective OA search engine that I am aware of. Together, the 5,000 content providers who contribute metadata to the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) have made available over 112 million documents. Around 60% of these are open access, so the number of OA documents in the world can be said to be somewhere about 67 million. BASE also posts their own online statistics table and chart – check it out here.

I wish I had the time to applaud and celebrate the growth of each and every OA service, but with 5,000 services contributing to BASE (and others that don’t), if I worked on this 365 days a year I would have to cover 14 initiatives every day. So please feel free to help out by applauding and celebrating the services most relevant to you – the journals in your discipline, your institutional repository, the services you find most helpful to search.

Below you will find tables listing the top services by quarterly (5% or more) and annual growth (10% or more). For the full numbers download the open data version (link above). As usual Internet Archive is well represented, with 5 items in the list of the top 13 services by quarterly growth and the top 18 services by annual growth. Internet Archive also offers 2 intriguing new services under Collections – a Trump Archive with over a thousand videos and a Fact Checker collection with over 400 items, available at https://archive.org/details/tvhttps://archive.org/details/tv

Of course PubMed and PubMedCentral are up there in the growth charts, in this quarter for total number of items (5% quarterly growth) as well as what looks (to me) like hesitant new steps by a substantial number of journals, with a 26% increase in the number of contributing journals that provide some OA and a 14% increase in the number of journals that provide OA to selected articles. The number of journals providing immediate free access and/or all articles open access continues to increase, so this is clearly growth, not backsliding.

DOAJ is included in the top growth services with 14% growth in the number of articles searchable at article level. DOAJ now has over 2.49 million articles searchable at the article level and should soon surpass 2.5 million articles.

arXiv and RePEC are on the list for strong growth in articles, and ROARMAP for growth in OA policies.
 

-->

Quarterly growth (percentage)		June 2017
32%	SocArxiv preprints	1,200
29%	BioRxiv all articles	12,280
18%	# of academic peer-reviewed books (DOAB)	8,172
18%	# publishers (DOAB)	217
8%	SCOAP3 articles	15,790
8%	Internet Archive Software	178,635
7%	Video (movies)  (Internet Archive)	3,437,542
7%	Texts  (Internet Archive)	12,821,051
5%	Images (Internet Archive)	1,476,743
5%	# of content providers (BASE)	5,621
5%	Audio (recordings)  (Internet Archive)	3,477,033
5%	Webpages (Internet Archive) (in billions)	298
5%	PubMedCentral (number of items)	4,400,000

 
-->

Annual growth (percentage)		06/30/17
68%	# of academic peer-reviewed books (DOAB)	8,172
40%	# publishers (DOAB)	217
39%	SCOAP3 number of archives	15,790
34%	Video (movies)  (Internet Archive)	3,437,542
33%	Internet Archive: Software	178,635
29%	# of content providers (BASE)	5,621
27%	Texts  (Internet Archive)	12,821,051
26%	PMC journals some OA	609
25%	Internet Archive: Images	1,476,743
20%	# of documents (BASE)	112,458,360
17%	Audio (recordings)  (Internet Archive)	3,477,033
17%	RePEc journal articles	1,491,037
14%	# of articles searchable at article level (DOAJ)	2,493,835
14%	PMC select deposit journals	4,296
13%	RePEC downloadable	2,143,844
13%	Total Policies (ROARMAP)	872
13%	PMC # items	4,400,000
10%	arXiv  http://arxiv.org/	1,278,739

 This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series Feel free to copy and share - with love.  Note that images are compressed by the software to reduce file size, and they are also quickly outdated. You are welcome to use the images, but my recommendation is to download the data and make your own graphics. It's easier than you think with tools like modern spreadsheet software.
 

Download data here

 Highlights

Arguably the best indicator of the global collaborative growth of open access, whether through archives or publications, is the ongoing impressive growth of what we can access through the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, which surpassed two major milestones in 2016: over 100 million documents (about 60% open access) and 5,000 content providers. The growth rates (22% for documents, 27% for content providers) are particularly impressive given the high pre-existing content rate. This is amazing success not just for BASE, but for all of us. If you’ve published a thesis through an institutional repository that allows for metadata harvesting, or published an article in a journal that contributes article-level data for metadata harvesting, your contribution is reflected here. This is a meta-level indicator of our global success.

I’ve added a new metric for medical open access, a keyword search of PubMed for “cancer” for articles with no date limit, last 5 years, last 2 years, and last year, further limited to free fulltext to determine the percentage of items for which fulltext is available. This ranges from 26% overall (no date limit), to 40 – 44% for items published in the last 2 – 5 years, to 32% for articles published in the last year.

Also added this quarter: OECD iLibrary – with more than 11,000 free books, this one publisher’s OA collection is nearly double the size of the 167 publishers included in the impressivley growing Directory of Open Access Books! arXiv, in addition to an over 10% growth rate last year, inspired the recent development of two similar services, socArXiv and bioRxiv, newly added to facilitate future growth tracking. The DOAJ get-tough inclusion policy and March 2016 major weeding means the DOAJ count for titles, countries and journals searchable at the article level are all down from last year, while articles searchable at the article level through DOAJ continued to show robust growth of 13%. DOAJ’s quarterly growth is back to an impressive rate of just under 3 titles per day. RePEC surpassed a milestone of 2 million downloadable items this year, while Internet Archive surpassed 3 milestones: there are now more than 3 million video and audio recordings, and more than 11 million texts (the number of IA web pages archived is way down, by the billions – such a difference it strikes me as likely due to a glitch in counting, whether before or after). Recently Open Journal Systems announced that OJS is now used by more than 10,000 active journals which <>.

Kudos and thanks to everyone in the open access movement – every researcher, author, editor, publisher, archive manager, librarian, policy-maker, and activist who is making open access happen. What of 2017? My advice: let’s remember the beautiful vision of the potential unprecedented public good of open access – forged not at a time of peace and certainty, but rather within months of the trauma of 9/11 – repeated below – and keep on making it happen.

BOAI vision:

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.

Selected numbers and growth by service:

Directory of Open Access Journals 

Highlights: in March 2016 DOAJ removed more than 3,000 journals, reflecting a new get-tough inclusion policy. All journals that had not gone through DOAJ’s new application process were removed. As a result, in spite of robust quarter since the removal process, most of DOAJ’s key data are lower at the end of 2016 than at 2015, with the exception of number of articles searchable through DOAJ which grew by 13%.

• 9,455 journals (down from 10,963 in 2015, a 14% decrease. Note that this quarter DOAJ added 246 journals for a current growth rate of close to 3 titles per day).
• 6,634 journals searchable at article level (down from 6,780 in 2015, a 2% decrease. Note that this quarter DOAJ increased the number of searchable journals by 217).
• 2,400,258 articles (up 13% from 2,123,402 at the end of 2015, very impressive given the journal weeding process)
• 128 countries (down from 136 at the end of 2016)

Electronic Journals Library

•  55,562 journals that can be read free-of-charge (up from 51,983 at the end of 2017, a 7% growth rate)

OECD iLibrary  * (selected data points) (just added, no growth figures)

• 11,050 e-book titles
• 5,130 multilingual summaries
• 5,200 working papers
• 5 billion data points across 42 databases

Directory of Open Access Books

• 5,602 books (up from 3,789 at the end of 2015, a 48% growth rate)
• 167 publishers (up from 134 at the end of 2014, 33 publishers added, a 25% growth rate)

OpenDOAR 

3,000 repository milestone!!!

• 3,285 repositories (up from 2,991 at the end of 2015, a 10% growth rate)

Registry of Open Access Repositories

•  4,365 repositories (up from 4,147 at the end of 2015, a 5% growth rate)

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine 

100 million document milestone!!!
5,000 content providers milestone!!!

• 103,090,961 documents (up from 84.25 million at the end of 2015, a 22% growth rate)
• 5,023 content sources (up from 3,965 at the end of 2015, a 27% growth rate)

PubMedCentral

4 million article milestone!!!

•  4.1 million articles (up from 3.7 million at the end of 2015, an 11% growth rate)
• 2,326 journals actively participating in PubMedCentral (up from 2,021 at the end of 2015, a 10% growth rate)
• 1,720 journals with immediate free access (up from 1,553 at the end of 2015, an 11% growth rate)
• 1,426 journals with all articles open access (up from 1,331 at the end of 2015, a 7% growth rate)
• 569 journals with some articles open access (up from 423 at the end of 2015, a 35% growth rate)

arXiv

• 1,219,224 preprints (up from 1,105,906 at the end of 2015, a 10% growth rate)

SocArXiv Preprints (launched December 7, 2016, inspired by arXiv)  **

• 631 searchable preprints

bioRxiv
(in beta December 31, 2016, inspired by arXiv) ***

• 7,500 articles (based on “all articles” search, 750 pages X 10 articles / page)

RePEC

2 million downloadable items milestone!!!

• 2,021,534 downloadable items (up from 1,942,541 at the end of 2015, a 13% growth rate)

ROARMAP

• 803 total open access mandate policies (up from 762 at the end of 2015, a 5% growth rate)

Internet Archive

3 million milestones for video and audiorecordings!!!
10 million milestone for texts (now 11 million)!!!

• 11 million texts (up from 8.8 million at the end of 2015, a 26% growth rate

Notes

 * OECD iLibrary statement on free-to-read (from About page):

All book and journal content is available to all users to read online by clicking the READ icon. Read editions are optimised for browser-enabled mobile devices and can be read online wherever there is an internet connection – desktop computer, tablets or smart phones. They are also shareable and embeddable.
The site also features content for all users to access and download such as the OECD Factbook, OECD Working Papers, Indicators, and more.
Subscribers benefit from full access to all content in all available formats.

** about SocArXiv (from the Dec. 7, 2016 launch announcement):

SocArXiv, the open access, open source archive of social science, is officially launching in beta version today. Created in partnership with the Center for Open Science, SocArXiv provides a free, noncommercial service for rapid sharing of academic papers; it is built on the Open Science Framework, a platform for researchers to upload data and code as well as research results

*** about bioRxiv (from about page):

bioRxiv (pronounced “bio-archive”) is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences. It is operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a not-for-profit research and educational institution. By posting preprints on bioRxiv, authors are able to make their findings immediately available to the scientific community and receive feedback on draft manuscripts before they are submitted to journals.

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.