A great step towards OA for all publicly funded research!

President Bush has signed the omnibus appropriations bill (Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007, HR. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. Researchers funded by the NIH will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine's online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.

Worldwide, this now makes a total of 35 OA mandates already adopted and 8 more proposed so far, see ROARMAP: http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/. The NIH now joins 6 of the 7 UK Research Councils, the Wellcome Trust and many other prestigious providers of research funding in acknowledging the immense value of open access to research publications and scientific progress.

To researchers, this means a far greater volume of essential research publications are now available free to all with access to the internet. So congratulations to all who have worked so hard to reach this immensely important end of year present.

Where are we now? - OA strides ahead

It’s the time of year to assess the progress of on-going developments, and looking critically at OA is no exception. Both Peter Suber and Heather Morrison (see http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/12-02-07.htm#predictions and http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2007/12/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-2007.html respectively) have provided very encouraging statistics to end the year.

It is now important to remind all libraries and scientific users in the developing world that there are now vast quantities of OA material available for free and immediate use from OA journals and Institutional Repositories.

For example, in Heather Morrison’s blog, the following information is provided:

"There are already more journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals than in the holdings of the world's largest commercial scholarly publisher. There are more non-embargoed, scholarly journals in DOAJ than in the largest of the aggregated packages purchased by libraries.Some brief and approximate figures (non-embargoed, fulltext, peer-reviewed journals):

DOAJ: 3,000 journals
Science Direct: 2,000 journals
EBSCO Academic Search Complete / Gale Cengage
Academic OneFile: 1,700 journals"

For full details, see Directory of Open Access Journals: Already the Biggest of the Big Deals? . . . . Could the Directory of Open Access Journals already be the world's biggest big deal, or aggregation of scholarly journals?’

And how many OA articles are now available from Institutional Repostories?

Heather Morrison provides the following statistics (though not all articles in OAI, for example, are published refereed research articles):

“Scientific Commons: Close to 17 million items, from 7 million authors
OAIster: 14 million items, 914 contributors
PubMedCentral, the world's largest open access archive, hits the one million mark June 21, 2007
rePEC, Research Papers in Economics, surpasses half a million records in the third quarter, about 400,000 or so were online
OpenDOAR lists more than 1,000 repositories November 21, 2007.”

Many developing countries are in the top 15 countries using IRs, as recorded by a number of repositories able to provide this kind of information.

So these facts provide a wonderful end of year gift with which to celebrate the transition from 2007 to 2008. We should be hugely encouraged and celebrate!

It’s the time of year to assess the progress of on-going developments, and looking critically at OA is no exception. Both Peter Suber and Heather Morrison see http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/12-02-07.htm#predictions and http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2007/12/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-2007.html respectively) have provided very encouraging statistics to end the year.

It is now important to remind all libraries and scientific users in the developing world that there are already vast quantities of OA material available for free and immediate use from OA journals and Institutional Repositories.

For example, in Heather Morrison’s blog, the following information is provided:

‘There are already more journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals than in the holdings of the world's largest commercial scholarly publisher. There are more non-embargoed, scholarly journals in DOAJ than in the largest of the aggregated packages purchased by libraries.Some brief and approximate figures (non-embargoed, fulltext, peer-reviewed journals):

DOAJ: 3,000 journals

Science Direct: 2,000 journals

EBSCO Academic Search Complete / Gale Cengage Academic OneFile: 1,700 journals’

For full details, see Directory of Open Access Journals: Already the Biggest of the Big Deals? . . . . Could the Directory of Open Access Journals already be the world's biggest big deal, or aggregation of scholarly journals?’
And how many OA articles are now available from Institutional Repostories? Heather Morrison provides the following statistics (though not all articles in OAI, for example, are published refereed research articles):
‘Scientific Commons: Close to 17 million items, from 7 million authors
OAIster: 14 million items, 914 contributors
PubMedCentral, the world's largest open access archive, hits the one million mark June 21, 2007
rePEC, Research Papers in Economics, surpasses half a million records in the third quarter, about 400,000 or so were online
OpenDOAR lists more than 1,000 repositories November 21, 2007’
Many developing countries are in the top 15 countries using IRs, as recorded by a number of repositories able to provide this kind of information.

So these facts provide a wonderful seasonal gift with which to celebrate the transition from 2007 to 2008. We should be hugely encouraged and celebrate!