Monday, April 02, 2018

Dramatic Growth of Open Access March 2018


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

 
Mabe, M., & Amin, M. (2001). Growth dynamics of scholarly and scientific journals. Scientometrics, 51(1), 147-162.

Price, D. J. d. S. (1963). Little science, big science. New York: Columbia University Press.

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.  Full data can be downloaded from here.