Open Access Taking Over The World!

Liz Allen posted this on the Wall of the PLoS Facebook group yesterday:

Here's a fun Friday activity for all of you who like to track the stats of the inevitable rise and world domination of OA!

Heather from SPARC turned me onto this. it's almost as much fun as watching the number of members to this group grow, we are now at 700!.

Did you know that there are currently 2893 OA journals in the directory of open access journals (http://www.DOAJ.org) and that 63 new ones came on board in the last 30 days, that's about 2 per day. Wow.

Another cool mash up site (great logo, takes a minute or so to load) is http://maps.repository66.org/ there you can see the number of OA repositories mapped across the globe, there were 808 as of earlier today.

Gotta love that.

Wow! Just a few days ago I checked DOAJ and there were half that many OA journals listed! Very happy!

More like this

Just a few days ago I checked DOAJ and there were half that many OA journals listed!

Must have been a glitch -- I remember when they hit the 2500 milestone, and that was many months ago.

The number I like to watch is OA/TA, the ratio of OA to Toll Access journals. There are about 24-25,000 scholarly journals in the world, and well over 10% of them are now OA. I figure the tipping point will be around 15-20% -- between one in five and one in six journals. When that happens the perceived penalty for choosing OA (smaller number of lower-prestige journals to choose from) will stop being such a powerful deterrent and all the realpolitik types will stop saying things like "I'll publish OA when I've got tenure but to get there I need to play the game".

Not long now. Viva la revolución!

Must have been a glitch, because I was surprised at that time to see only about 1600 OA journals on the list. I thought there were more than that.