The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: Dramatic Growth of Open Access December 31, 2017

Highlights As usual the open access movement has much to celebrate as 2017 draws to a close, and the whole world has much to look forward to from open access in 2018. As of today there are 4.6 million articles in PubMedCentral, thanks in large measure to constantly increasing participation by scholarly journals; sometime in 2018 this is likely to exceed 5 million. DOAJ added a net 1,272 journals (3.5 / day) and showed even stronger growth in article searchability; a DOAJ milestone of 3 million searchable articles in likely to come in 2018. The Directory of Open Access Books nearly doubled in size and now has more than 10,000 books from 247 publishers. Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, the best surrogate for overall growth, continues to amaze with over 120 million documents, growth of 17.3 million in 2017, a 17% growth rate on a very substantial base; a 20% growth in content providers is an indication of the overall growth of the repository movement. arXiv's growth rate was 10% while newcomer arXiv clones socRxiv grew by 187% and bioRxiv by 151%. REPEC grew by 13%, SCOAP3 by 32%. Internet Archive grew by 31 billion web pages, 4 million texts, 2.4 million images, 800,000 movies, and 600,000 audio recordings. Following are selected details indicating the content numbers at the end of 2017, 2017 growth by number, percentage, and where warranted, by day. Full data can be downloaded from here: https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/dataverse/dgoa