OA by the numbers

This list is part of the Open Access Directory.


 * This is a list of numbers measuring the status or growth of open access.
 * The format is: Number.  Date [last verified or updated].  Annotation.  Please use links whenever possible so that users can verify and update the numbers.
 * Peter Suber started this list on Wikipedia in early 2005. Wikipedians deleted it twice and then chopped it into pieces.  We restored it here on OAD, and have been expanding and updating it since 2008.
 * If these numbers don't tell the whole story, it's better to add new numbers to tell the rest of the story than to delete numbers already here.

OA journals (Gold OA)

 * 8,817. March 27, 2013. The number of peer-reviewed OA journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
 * 1,461 (or 16.6%). March 27, 2013. The number of CC-BY licensed journals in the DOAJ. The same page gives the tallies for other CC licenses. CC-BY currently swamps the other licenses, and is represented in the DOAJ roughly three times more often than the next most common open license.
 * 5,858 (or 66.4%). March 27, 2013. The number of no-fee journals in the DOAJ.
 * 1,162 (or 13.2%). March 27, 2013. The number of SPARC Europe seal journals in the DOAJ.  (The SPARC Europe seal requires metadata sharing and a CC-BY license.)
 * 3.4. February 5, 2013. Average number of new journals added each day in 2012 to the DOAJ.


 * 9,651. November 28, 2011. The number of OA journals listed in Open J-Gate. Note: as of February 5, 2013, the Open J-Gate website is inactive.
 * 6,502. December 12, 2011. The number of peer-reviewed OA journals listed in Open J-Gate.
 * 3,232. December 12, 2011. The number of non-peer-reviewed OA journals listed in Open J-Gate.


 * 38,483. February 5, 2013. The number of "free e-journals" (not all peer-reviewed) listed in EZB.


 * 20,963. February 5, 2013. The number of "free e-journals" (apparently not all peer-reviewed) listed in the Nottingham Trent University list of Free E-Journals.


 * 429. February 5, 2013. Number of institutional members of BioMed Central.


 * 140 / 8. February 5, 2013. Number of institutional members / institutional advocates of the Public Library of Science.  PLoS doesn't provide this number; users have to count the institutions listed.


 * 102. February 5, 2013. Number of publishers offering hybrid OA options according to SHERPA.  The list doesn't include a tally and users must count the entries manually.


 * 20. February 5, 2013. Number of journal declarations of independence.


 * 602 / 695 / 68. February 5, 2013. Number of society publishers / OA journals / Creative Commons licensed according to the second edition of Society Publishers with Open Access Journals, edited by Caroline Sutton and Peter Suber.

OA repositories (Green OA)

 * 2,256. February 10, 2013.  Number of OA, OAI-compliant repositories listed by OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories).


 * 3,361. February 10, 2013.  Number of OA, OAI-compliant repositories listed by ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories).


 * 3,946. February 10, 2013.  Number of OA, OAI-compliant repositories listed by OpenArchive.edu.


 * 1,100 / 25,000,000 records. February 10, 2013.  Numbers of OA, OAI-compliant contributors / records harvested (indexed and searched) by OAIster.


 * 1,269 / 38,354,066 records. February 10, 2012.  Numbers of OA, OAI-compliant archives / publications harvested (indexed and searched) by ScientificCommons.org.


 * 820,179. February 10, 2013.  Number of articles on deposit at arXiv.  The number is posted on the upper left corner of the arXiv home page.


 * 2,600,000. February 10, 2013.  Number of free full-text articles on deposit at PubMed Central.
 * 1217. February 10, 2013. Number of journals depositing all articles in PubMed Central.
 * 247. February 10, 2013. Number of journals depositing NIH-funded articles in PubMed Central.


 * 12,887,344 February 10, 2012.  Total number of articles in Entrez PubMed with "Links to Full Text".


 * 1,081,110. February 10, 2013. Number of full-text articles archived at the CERN document server.
 * 333,977. February 10, 2013. Number of published articles archived at the CERN document server.
 * 668,019. February 10, 2013. Number of preprints archived at the CERN document server.
 * 18,826. February 10, 2013. Number of theses archived at the CERN document server.
 * 6,847. February 10, 2013. Number of reports archived at the CERN document server.


 * 14,380 February 10, 2013. Number of full-text items on deposit at E-LIS, the Open Archive for Library and Information Studies.


 * 42,125,071 / 2,462 February 19, 2013. Number of documents / content sources on deposit at Bielefeld Academic Search Engine.


 * 10. March 15, 2005.  Average number of minutes it takes to self-archive one article, according to Les Carr and Stevan Harnad, Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving.

OA books

 * 42,000. February 10, 2013.  Number of OA books in Project Gutenberg.


 * 64. February 10, 2013.  Number of institutions contributing content to the Open Content Alliance.  The OCA doesn't provide this number; users must count the number of institutions listed.


 * 21. February 10, 2013.  Number of universities contributing content to the Google Book Search Library Project.


 * 74 / 5,595,108. February 10, 2013. Number of HathiTrust partners contributing to the number of books digitized in the HathiTrust Digital Library.


 * 82. February 10, 2013. Number of publishers of OA books listed in the OAD. Users must count them manually.


 * 25. February 10, 2013. Number of AAUP-member publishers of OA books, according to the Spring 2012 report of the American Association of University Presses.


 * 1,265 / 35. February 10, 2013. Number of academic peer-reviewed books from participating publishers in the Directory of Open Access Books.


 * 92. January 1, 2004.  Percentage of books not generating revenues for their publishers or copyright holders, according to Denise Troll Covey, Librarian for Special Projects at Carnegie Mellon University, as quoted by Daniel Clancy, Engineering Director for the Google Book Search Project, in a talk at Stanford University on July 18, 2005.

OA policies

 * 353. February 18, 2013.  Total OA Mandates.  ROARMAP.
 * 200. February 18, 2013.  Number of research institutions mandating OA to their research output, according to ROARMAP.
 * 55. February 18, 2013.  Number of funding agencies mandating OA to the research they fund, according to ROARMAP.
 * 98. February 18, 2013. Number of Thesis Mandates, according to ROARMAP.


 * Numbers related to the OA policy at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH):
 * 90,000. February 8, 2012. Number of peer-reviewed articles per year based on NIH-funded research and covered by the policy, according to an NIH update dated February 1, 2012.
 * 100 million. February 8, 2012. Number of dollars per year the NIH spends on page charges for grantee publications in subscription-based or non-OA journals, according to the September 11, 2008, Congressional testimony of NIH Director Elias Zerhouni (see p. 82).
 * 4 million. February 8, 2012. Number of dollars the NIH spent in Fiscal Year 2011 to implement its OA policy, according to the December 16, 2011, open letter from NIH Director Francis Collins to Rep. Joseph Pitts.
 * 100. February 18, 2013. Percentage of surveyed publishers willing to publish NIH-funded authors, according to the OAD list of publisher policies on NIH-funded authors. No surveyed publishers refuse to publish NIH-funded authors on account of its OA policy.


 * 63.2. November 29, 2011.  Percentage of surveyed non-OA journals permitting authors to self-archive their postprints, according to Eprints statistics.


 * 94.9. November 29, 2011.  Percentage of surveyed non-OA journals permitting authors to self-archive their preprints, postprints, or both, according to Eprints statistics.


 * 38. February 18, 2013.  Number of research funding agencies willing to pay article processing fees on behalf of grantees who publish in fee-based OA journals, according to BioMed Central's Summary of funding agency policies on open access.


 * 31. February 18, 2013.  Number of research funding agencies to encourage or require grantees to deposit the results of their research in OA repositories, according to BioMed Central's Summary of funding agency policies on open access.


 * 81. November 29, 2011.  Percentage of authors who would "willingly" comply with a mandate from their funder or employer to self-archive their research articles, according to Alma Swan and Sheridan Brown, Open access self-archiving: An author study.


 * 120. February 18, 2013.  Number of presidents and provosts of U.S. colleges and universities endorsing the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), which would mandate open access to publicly-funded research.  (New signatures are invited.)


 * 5,731 / 654. February 18, 2013.  Numbers of individual / institutional signatories to the Budapest Open Access Initiative.


 * 420. February 18, 2013.  Number of institutional signatories to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge.


 * 104. February 18, 2013.  Number of institutional members of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access.  The ATA doesn't provide this number; users have to count the institutions listed.


 * 71. February 18, 2013.  Nations with Creative Commons licenses customized for local law.  CC doesn't provide this number; users have to count the nations listed.


 * 24. June 20, 2003.  Number of participants signing the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing.


 * 211. February 18, 2013. Number of signatories to the Panton Principles for Open Data in Science.


 * 492. February 18, 2013. Number of signatories to the Research Without Walls pledge "to assist in the peer review process (as a reviewer, board/committee member, chair, editor, etc.) only for conferences, journals, and other publication venues that make all accepted publications available to the public for free via the web."


 * 13,281. February 18, 2013. Number of signatories to the Cost of Knowledge pledge or petition not to support Elsevier journals.

Journal pricing crisis

 * 273 / 73. Percentage increases in journal prices (serial unit cost) / inflation rate (consumer price index) from 1986 to 2004, according to OA ARL statistics.


 * 381 / 97. Percentage increases in journal prices (serial unit cost) / inflation rate (consumer price index) from 1986 to 2009, according to TA ARL Statistics, 2008. Research library trends tables and graphs. 7-21.


 * 238-537 / 65. Updated percentage increase comparison: data from the Library Journal Annual Periodicals Price Surveys showed that the increase in scholarly journal prices from 1990 to 2008 ranged from 238% (astronomy) to 537% (general science), which is 3.7 and 8.3 times the increase in the consumer price index, respectively.  See here for details and data.


 * 56.  Percentage of research institutions in the poorest countries (per-capita gross national product of less than $1,000/year) with no current subscriptions to international journals.  According to Barbara Aronson in the New England Journal of Medicine, March 2004.
 * 34. Percent of institutions in countries in the next tier of poverty (per-capita GNP of $1,000 to $3,000/year) with no current subscriptions to international journals.  Ibid.