The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: December 31, 2012 Dramatic Growth of Open Access

"Updated Jan. 1, 2013 thanks to very helpful informal peer review from Pablo de Castro (E-LIS figure and explanation for discrepancy in growth rates of OpenDOAR and ROAR). 2012 was another awesome year for open access!. This post highlights and celebrates just how much open access is available already. The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) cross-searches over 40 million documents in over 2,400 repositories - nearly double the number in just 3 years, demonstrating yet again strong growth in open access archiving. The Directory of Open Access Journals, in addition to listing fully open access journals, provides an article-level search that is available for a growing percentage of DOAJ journals. The number of articles searchable through DOAJ is just under one million - a third of this growth taking place in 2012 . What a great way to show that not only is the number of open access journals growing rapidly - more importantly, the number of articles published in open access journals is growing even more dramatically! A heartfelt thanks to everyone around the world who is making open access happen - all of the scholars sharing our work, readers, advocates, repository managers, publishers, librarians, and others. All the best to you and your OA endeavours in 2013! Notable annual growth by percentage Directory of Open Access Journals - articles searchable by article level grew by 234,449 articles to a total of 955,720 articles, an increase of 33% on a substantial base. The Registry of Open Access Repositories showed a growth rate of 730 repositories or 28%, a somewhat puzzling contradiction to the relatively slow growth rate of OpenDOAR. The number of journals depositing all articles in PubMedCentral as open access grew by 191 to a total of 893, a 27% increase this year, and the number of paper downloads from the Social Sciences Research Network was more than 2 million higher this year than in 2011 (10 million downloads total), for a 27% increase."