A Happy Open Access New Year!

[Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>]

*excuse cross postings*

The latest edition of my Dramatic Growth of Open Access and 
Predictions for 2008 has been posted, at: 
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2007/12/dramatic-growth-of-open- 
access.html

In brief, open access growth continues very strong in any area 
examined (number of fully open access journals, number of 
repositories, number of items in repositories).

While growth continues at a dramatic pace, it is important to 
recognize that there are already very substantial numbers of open 
access resources.

The Directory of Open Access Journals lists more than 3,000 
journals.  This is more journals than one will find in even the 
largest of the "big deals".  It is also more non-embargoed, 
current, fulltext, peer-reviewed content than is found in even 
the largest of aggregated packages.  The 3,000 journals in DOAJ 
may already be 15% of the world's estimated 20-25,000 
peer-reviewed scholarly journals. If we have not yet reached 15%, 
it is almost certain that this will happen in 2008.

Scientific Commons, just one of the repository search engines, 
includes more than 17 million items from over 7 million authors. 
OpenDOAR, a vetted list of open access repositories, lists more 
than 1,000 repositories as of November 2007.

The growth rate for the Canadian Association of Research 
Libraries' institutional repositories, as measured by a CARL 
Metadata Harvester search, was greater in the (incomplete) final 
quarter of 2007, than in all of 2006.

My conclusion is that open access has now reached a point of 
significant capacity, and momentum.  Each one of the journals 
listed in DOAJ has an editorial infrastructure, willing authors 
and reviewers, and no doubt many could scale.  Traditional 
publishers are experimenting with open access in a variety of 
ways.  Libraries and publishers are trying new approaches to 
supporting publishing in an open access environment.  The SCOAP3 
Consortium, which seeks to find a means to fund full open access 
publishing for high energy physics, is the initiative to watch in 
2008, in my opinion.

A Happy Open Access New Year to all.

Any opinion expressed in this e-mail is that of the author alone, 
and does not represent the opinion or policy of BC Electronic 
Library Network or Simon Fraser University Library.

Heather Morrison, MLIS
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com