Dramatic Growth of Open Access December 31, 2016

"Arguably the best indicator of the global collaborative growth of open access, whether through archives or publications, is the ongoing impressive growth of what we can access through the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, which surpassed two major milestones in 2016: over 100 million documents (about 60% open access) and 5,000 content providers. The growth rates (22% for documents, 27% for content providers) are particularly impressive given the high pre-existing content rate. This is amazing success not just for BASE, but for all of us. If you've published a thesis through an institutional repository that allows for metadata harvesting, or published an article in a journal that contributes article-level data for metadata harvesting, your contribution is reflected here. This is a meta-level indicator of our global success. ...I've added a new metric for medical open access, a keyword search of PubMed for "cancer" for articles with no date limit, last 5 years, last 2 years, and last year, further limited to free fulltext to determine the percentage of items for which fulltext is available. This ranges from 26% overall (no date limit), to 40 - 44% for items published in the last 2 - 5 years, to 32% for articles published in the last year...."