Re: Dramatic growth of open access

["Peter Banks" <pbanks@diabetes.org>]

This is just quick-and-dirty counting, but I don't think the data 
show that open access continues to grow dramatically, not in 
medicine at least. The growth may even have leveled off.

These are the number of general medical titles in the DOAJ, 
listed by start year.

2005	9
2004	30
2003	27
2002	25
2001	25
2000	21
1999	17
1998	9
1997	15
1996	11
1995	9
1994	2
1993	2
1992	2
1991	1
1990	1

In the 5 minutes I had, it was too hard to search by start of 
publication year in PubMed, but I wonder if the number of new 
titles pretty much parallels those in the DOAJ.

The numbers may overstate the real impact of the new OA journals. 
Several of the 2005 journals are highly specialized and some 
publish very little content; in fact, some seem largely titles in 
search of papers. For example, the Spanish-language journal 
Archivos de Medicina seems to have published just one paper in 
2005. The Biomedical Imaging and Intervention Journal published 
13 papers, but only one was of original research. Other journals 
are more robust, like BMC's Head and Face Medicine, even if of 
specialized interest.

The point is that even if the overall numbers showed the growth 
of OA--and I am not convinced they do--you have also to look at 
the number, type, and usefulness of articles. I don't know if the 
OA tide is coming in or going out; it certainly isn't a tsunami.


Peter Banks
Publisher
American Diabetes Association
Email: pbanks@diabetes.org

>>> heatherm@eln.bc.ca 04/03/06 8:04 PM >>>

Open access - both journals and archives - continues to grow
dramatically.

New titles are being added to the Directory of Open Access
Journals at the rate of more than 2 per day.

An OAIster search today looks through more than 700,000 new items
than a search three months ago (in total, well over 7 million
items).

E-LIS, the Open Archive for Library and Information Science, is
expanding at the equivalent of about 56% per year.

For more details and analysis, please see my blogpost, The
Dramatic Growth of Open Access:  March 31, 2006 Update, at:
http://tinyurl.com/o7zkf

Heather G. Morrison
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com
E-LIS Editor, Canada http://eprints.rclis.org/