Dramatic Growth of Open Access in 2012

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!..

A perspective. Elsevier claims to serve "more than 30 million scientists, students and health and information professionals worldwide" from: <http://www.elsevier.com/about/at-a-glance>.This is .04% of the 7 billion people on this planet open access aims to serve! Note that internet access and literacy is required to take advantage of open access to the scholarly literature - but unlike Elsevier, open access is not placing barriers, we're just doing the best we can to overcome them...