The March 31, 2010 issue of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access is now available. Highlights: DOAJ is now at 4,863 journals, having added a net total of 864 journals in the past year for a DOAJ growth rate of over 2 titles per day. The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine now searches over 23 million documents; this is an increase of over 1.2 million in the last quarter, or over 13,000 documents per day. There are now more than 200 open access mandate policies listed in ROARMAP, with strong growth in every category. Compliance with the U.S. National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy is 62% – still not 100%, but definitely getting closer. In the past year,120 more journals began contributing all content as open access to PubMedCentral. There are now more than 5,000 journals around the world using Open Journal Systems (OJS).

Some of the journals whose authors showed very low compliance rates last December are now showing improved compliance rates. Since it is the authors, not the journals, that the policy applies to, this is a very indirect measure of the likely helpfulness (or not) of the journal with respect to facilitating author compliance with the policy. The compliance rate with the requirement policy dating from 2008 for authors of Elsevier’s Addictive Behaviors and American Heart Journal is about 50%, as with Wiley-Blackwell’s Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. Authors of Taylor & Francis’ AIDS Care is at 26% compliance, American Journal of Bioethics 44%. To repeat, this is compliance with the new firm requirement policy, not the voluntary policy which has been in effect since 2004.

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

With this issue, the explanatory notes have been separated from the main spreadsheet, to facilitate updating of the google docs editions. These are my working notes; developing a more readable version is on my to-do list. Questions about methodology are always welcome, at hgmorris at sfu dot ca

For full data and explanatory notes:

Google docs for viewing: