As 2009 draws to a close advocates of Open Access (OA) will doubtless be looking back and weighing up the year's events. So what has been achieved, and what have been the main OA developments in 2009? Has it been a good year or a bad year for OA? Let's consider these questions.
Mandates are currently accelerating at a fast rate (See Alma Swan'sgraph). ...
OpenDOAR currently lists over 1,500 repositories, and Scientific Commons — the repository aggregator service — has over 32 million items listed in its database. ...
And the bad news? There remains some doubt as to the efficacy of the mandates being introduced. ...
There are also worries about the nature and quality of some of the content being deposited in repositories, much of which appears not to be OA's target content (peer-reviewed papers). ...
There are now over 4,500 Gold journals. As there are estimated to be roughly around 25,000 peer-reviewed journals in total, this suggests that one fifth of all scholarly journals are now OA. ...
[T]he rate of progress of Gold OA is clearly accelerating. ...
In addition, most subscription journals now offer a Hybrid OA option for some or all their journals ... And a growing number of funders and research institutions are creating Gold OA funds ...
The bad news? Today's 4,500 Gold OA journals are not the best fifth. ...
What has clearly not helped Gold OA is the fact that a growing number of start-up OA publishers have attracted criticism from the research community for their poor business practices ...
[W]here OA has historically been seen as something of relevance only to scientific and medical (STM) journals this year has seen growing interest in OA for the humanities, and for books. ...
Below is a list of 17 notable developments that took place during 2009 ... [Note: omitting list.]
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 12/16/2009 02:51:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
