Dramatic Growth of Open Access

Kudos to the Directory of Open Access Journals for an oustanding second quarter! In the past few months, DOAJ has added 912 titles for a total of 9,759 journals. That's a net growth rate of over 10 titles per day, up from the previous rate of over 3 titles per day. At this rate it won't be long before DOAJ exceeds the milestone of 10,000 journals. PubMedCentral [PMC] growth continues to be very strong in spite of what looks like a bit of backsliding. The percentage of articles published with free fulltext available continues to grow at a steady pace and is now up to 25%.

Megajournal PLoS ONE's amazing growth has not been slowed one little bit by the entrance of competition in this market - in 2012 PLoS ONE published over 23,000 articles, up from just under 14,000 in 2011!

...a special mention to the Internet Archive - while only a small fraction of the works posted there are scholarly in nature, the capture of over 66 billion webpages this quarter for a total of over 347 billion webpages is noteworthy.

The full data edition is available via uO Recherche along with charts and a PDF of this commentary.