OA by the numbers

This list is part of the Open Access Directory.

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• 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, please add new numbers to tell more of the story rather than delete numbers already here.

OA journals (Gold OA)

• 11,169. February 16, 2018. Number of peer-reviewed OA journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
  • 3,164. February 16, 2018. Number of fee-based journals in the DOAJ.
  • 1,293. February 16, 2018. Number journals with the DOAJ Seal of Approval in the DOAJ. (The Seal of Approval requires that a journal meet seven criteria of OA best practice.)
  • 10,024 (or 94.8%). December 4, 2017. Number of journals in the DOAJ using Creative Commons licenses.
  • The three most popular Creative Commons licenses among journals in the DOAJ:
    • 4,831. February 16, 2018. Number of CC-BY licensed journals in the DOAJ.
    • 2,489. February 16, 2018. Number of CC-BY-NC-ND licensed journals in the DOAJ.
    • 1,938. February 16, 2018. Number of CC-BY-NC licensed journals in the DOAJ.
  • 123. February 16, 2018. Countries represented in the DOAJ.
  • 6. May 25, 2016. Number of titles added daily to the DOAJ in the quarterly period between December 31, 2015 and March 31, 2016, according to Heather Morrison. (Also see Heather's series of quarterly growth reports.)

• 59,692. February 16, 2018. Number of full-text "free e-journals" (not all peer-reviewed) listed in Electronic Journal Library.
  • 3941. Number of full-text journals added to the Electronic Journal Library between May 25, 2015 and May 25, 2016.

• 23,651. February 16, 2018. Number of "free e-journals" (apparently not all peer-reviewed) listed in the Nottingham Trent University list of Free E-Journals.

• 2,509. February 16, 2018. Number of journal publishers represented in the SHERPA RoMEO database. (For these publishers, SHERPA RoMEO reports their standing policies on green OA or self-archiving.)
  • 1,027 (39%). February 16, 2018. Number of publishers permitting self-archiving for the preprint and postprint, according to SHERPA RoMEO.
  • 829 (33%). February 16, 2018. Number of publishers permitting self-archiving for the postprint alone, SHERPA RoMEO.
  • 161 (7%). February 16, 2018. Number of publishers permitting self-archiving for the preprint alone, SHERPA RoMEO.
  • 492 (21%). February 16, 2018. Number of publishers not formally supporting self-archiving, SHERPA RoMEO.
  • 80%. February 16, 2018. Percentage of publishers permitting some form of self-archiving, SHERPA RoMEO.

• 965. February 16, 2018. Number of publishers allowing unembargoed green OA for the published edition or version of record of its journal articles, according to SHERPA RoMEO. (The same page also lists those that permit embargoed green OA for the published edition, broken down by the length of the embargo.)

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

• 100,000+. Number of APC-funded OA articles published in 2010, according to study by Solomon and Björk.
  • 906 / 904. Average APC represented in U.S. dollars for journals and articles published in 2010, according to study completed by Solomon and Björk.
  • 8 / 3,900. Minimum and maximum APC for journals and articles published in 2010 identified in study by Solomon and Björk, represented in US dollars.
    • 1,345. Average APC for commercial publishers represented in USD, according to study by Solomon and Björk.
    • 461. Average APC for "scientific societies and universities" represented in US dollars, shown in study by Solomon and Björk.
    • 246. Average APC for "universities or university departments" represented in US dollars, according to study by Solomon and Björk.
  • ≈ 25%. Approximate percent of "articles published were in journals charging less than 200 USD", shown in study by Solomon and Björk.

• Sources of funds used to pay APCs at APC-based journals, according to the Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) project, January 2011, Table 4.
  • 59%. Percentage of APCs paid by funding agencies (author's funder).
  • 24%. Percentage of APCs paid by universities (author's employer).
  • 12%. Percentage of APCs paid by authors themselves.

• 26. February 16, 2018. Number of journal declarations of independence.

• 967 / 1,009. February 16, 2018. Number of society publishers of OA journals / OA journals from society publishers, according to the Societies and Open Access Research (SOAR) project catalog, compiled by Caroline Sutton, Peter Suber, and Amanda Page.

• 500+. February 16, 2018. Number of institutional members of BioMed Central.

• 66. February 16, 2018. Number of Institutional Account Participants of the Public Library of Science. PLoS doesn't provide this number; users have to count the institutions listed.

• 14.8 million. February 16, 2018. Number of views and downloads of PeerJ articles and preprints.
  • 4,495. February 16, 2018. Number of peer-reviewed articles published by PeerJ.
  • 4,566. February 16, 2018. Number of preprints published by PeerJ.

OA repositories (Green OA)

• 3,500. February 16, 2018. Number of OA repositories listed by OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories).

• 4,618. February 16, 2018. Number of OA repositories listed by ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories).

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

• 2,000+ / 50,000,000+ records. February 16, 2018. 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.

• 1,359,363. February 16, 2018. Number of articles on deposit at arXiv. The number is posted on the upper left corner of the arXiv home page.
  • 139,000.000+. May 24, 2015. Number of downloads from arXiv in 2015, according to January 2016 update.
  • 105,000. May 24, 2015. Number of submissions to arXiv in 2015, according to January 2016 update.
  • 188 / 23. Number of arXiv institutional members and member countries represented, according to January 2016 update.

• 4,700,000. February 16, 2018. Number of free full-text articles on deposit at PubMed Central.
  • 2,089. February 16, 2018. Number of journals depositing all articles in PubMed Central.
  • 329. February 16, 2018. Number of journals depositing NIH-funded articles in PubMed Central.

• 15,000,000+. February 16, 2018. Number of books and texts available at the Internet Archive.

• 18,870. February 16, 2018. Number of articles available in the SCOAP³ repository.

• 4,304. May 30, 2016. Number of preprints available on deposit in bioRxiv.

• 5,698,645. May 23, 2016. Total number of articles in Entrez PubMed with "Links to Full Text".

• 1,061,068. May 23, 2016. Number of full-text articles archived at the CERN document server.
  • 166,607. May 23, 2016. Number of CERN full-text articles archived at the CERN document server.
  • 348,172. May 23, 2016. Number of published articles archived at the CERN document server.
    • 92,495. February 16, 2018. Number of CERN published articles archived at the CERN document server.
  • 615,904. May 23, 2016. Number of preprints archived at the CERN document server.
    • 21,363. February 16, 2018. Number of CERN preprints archived at the CERN document server.
  • 20,652. May 23, 2016. Number of theses archived at the CERN document server.
    • 7,649. February 16, 2018. Number of CERN theses archived at the CERN document server.
  • 6,583. February 16, 2018. Number of reports archived at the CERN document server.
    • 1,726. February 16, 2018. Number of CERN reports archived at the CERN document server.

• 19,876. February 16, 2018. Number of full-text items on deposit at E-LIS, the Open Archive for Library and Information Studies. Count performed manually based on available numbers provided by E-LIS.

• 123,285,704 / 6,142. February 16, 2018. 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

• 10,853 / 254. February 15, 2018. Number of OA books and participating publishers listed in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB).

• 56,000+. February 16, 2018. Number of OA books in Project Gutenberg.

• 2,850. Average download count for books included in the Knowledge Unlatched Pilot Collection as of 2016.

• 62. May 23, 2016. 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.

• 40+. February 16, 2018. Number of universities contributing content to the Google Book Search Library Project.

• 139 / 16,069,207. February 16, 2018. Number of HathiTrust partners contributing to the number of books digitized in the HathiTrust Digital Library.

• 217. April 10, 2018. Number of publishers of OA books listed in the Open Access Directory.

• 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.

• 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

• 898. February 16, 2018. Total OA Mandates, according to ROARMAP.
  • 556. May 23, 2016. Number of research institutions mandating OA to their research output, according to ROARMAP.
  • 79. May 23, 2016. Number of funding agencies mandating OA to the research they fund, according to ROARMAP.
  • 376. May 24, 2016. Number of policies and mandates adopted in the last 5 years (2011-2016), according to ROARMAP.
  • 542. February 16, 2018. Number of mandates and policies requiring deposit, according to ROARMAP.
  • 336. February 16, 2018. Number of Thesis Mandates, according to ROARMAP.
  • 84. February 16, 2018. Number of policy and mandate licensing conditions requiring "CC-BY or equivalent", according to ROARMAP.
  • 17. May 24, 2016. Number of funder policies and mandates including supplementary funder-dedicated APC funds, according to ROARMAP.
  • 8. February 16, 2018. Number of policies and mandates requiring Gold OA, 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.

• 72. February 16, 2018. Number of rights-retention university OA policies of the kind recommended in the guide to Good practices for university OA policies.

• 56. February 16, 2018. Number of university OA policies adopted by unanimous faculty votes, according to the Open Access Directory.

• 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.)

• 104. February 16, 2018. Number of institutional members of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. The ATA doesn't provide this number; users have to count the institutions listed.

• 91. February 16, 2018. Nations with Creative Commons licenses customized for local law.

OA declarations and pledges

• 6,083 / 1,026. February 16, 2018. Number of individual / institutional signatories to the Budapest Open Access Initiative. (Original released February 14, 2002.)

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

• 605. February 16, 2018. Number of institutional signatories to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge. (Original released October 22, 2003.)

• 270. October 23, 2016. Number of signatories to the Panton Principles for Open Data in Science. (Original released February 19, 2010.)

• 571. February 16, 2018. 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." (Original released October 18, 2011.)

• 16,691. February 16, 2018. Number of signatories to the Cost of Knowledge statement, pledging to refrain from (some combination of) writing, refereeing, or editing for Elsevier journals. (Original released January 22, 2012.)

• 11,772 / 452. February 16, 2018. Number of individual / institutional signatories to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). (Original released December 16, 2012.)

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.

• 4,057. Average "cash and non-cash" publication and distribution cost per-article, represented in GBP, according to report commissioned by UK Research Network (RIN).
  • 2,863. Average cost of publication and distribution per-article "excluding peer review non-cash costs" represented in GBP, shown in report commissioned by UK Research Network (RIN).
  • 1.08 billion. Reduction in “global costs of publishing, distribution and access” represented in GBP “If 90% of all journals were to be published in electronic format only", noting that this number would be "offset by a rise of £93m in user costs for printing", according to 2008 report commissioned by UK Research Network (RIN).
  • 561 million. Reduction in "global costs of publishing, distribution and access" represented in GBP "If 90% of all articles were made open access upon payment of a publication fee", also known as an APC, shown in 2008 report commissioned by UK Research Network (RIN).

• ≈ 3,247. Average estimated production cost per-article for "dual-mode production" for the "subscription or toll access publishing" model represented in GBP, according to 2009 report by Houghton, J. et al.
  • ≈ 2,728 / 2,337. Average estimated cost per-article for print and electronic production for the "subscription or toll access publishing" model shown in GBP, shown in 2009 report by Houghton, J. et al.

• 2,000. Average estimated production cost per-article for "dual mode open access" represented in GBP "excluding the costs of copy printing and delivery", according to 2009 report by Houghton, J. et al.
  • 1,830 / 1,524. Average estimated cost per-article for open access print and electronic production shown in GBP "excluding the costs of copy printing and delivery", according to 2009 report by Houghton, J. et al.

Other

• 67,541 February 8, 2018. Number of OA developments tagged by the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP), since its launch in April 2009.