In a bid to inform projections and planning in the sphere of Open Access for next year The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics released its special edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series. Highlight:
a quick snapshot of the continuum of access to scholarly journals suggests not only strong growth of open access journals, but a scholarly communications system well on its way to transitioning from toll to open access, with the pure toll access journal (no author self-archiving allowed, no back issues, etc.) a small, and diminishing, portion of the total. The growth of open access journals continues to be dramatic; there are now over 3,700 journals in DOAJ, 781 more journals than last year, 2 new titles per day. While content recruitment at the local repository may seem painfully slow, on a global basis the content and growth are phenomenal, with more than 24 million publications available through Scientific Commons, 19 million through OAIster. Every week, close to 150,000 new items become available through Scientific Commons.
2009 is predicted to be a year of implementation, of Walking the Talking*. The open access movement has crossed many milestones and gone through many learning curves. We now know what makes for good open access policy; OA has been demonstrated to be not only economically viable, but for some, also profitable; and many have become knowledgeable about the tools of OA. It is important not to underestimate, either the work that still needs to be done – or the growing momentum of Open Access.
