Month: December 2012

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Quantifying Open Access in 2012

Over at the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, open access advocate and thinker Heather Morrison takes a look at the astonishing growth of open access in 2012.  No hand-waving here; just cold, hard numbers:

  • The Directory of Open Access Journals now includes 8,461 journals, up by 1,133 since last year.  That’s an average of 3 new journals per day!
  • The Registry of Open Access Repositories is up to 3,032 repositories, up by 449 since last year.  An average of 8.6 new repositories every week!  (We hope to add a CUNY repository to the count soon!)
  • PubMed Central now includes a whopping 2.6 million open access articles, up by 300,000 since last year.  That averages out to 1 article every 2 minutes!

Read her full blog post for all numbers.  Any way you look at it, open access is growing, strengthening, speeding, surging. Put differently, open access is becoming inevitable.

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Couldn’t Make it to the CUNY IT Conference?

Don’t worry, you can peruse some of the many presentations about open access right here on the blog!

Jill posted her slideshow about the plans for a CUNYwide institutional repository earlier this week.

And here are three of the presentations from the session on open access curricular materials:

Susan Amper, Bronx Community College:
What’s Price Got to Do With It? Open Access Course Materials at CUNY

Johannah Rodgers, City Tech:
When the Virtual Meets the Real: An Assessment of the Benefits and “Costs” of Open Access Texts for First Year Writing Courses at CUNY

Maura Smale, City Tech:
Open Access Course Materials: The Library Perspective

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Don’t Take My Word for It

I know, I know, I’m always yakking about how CUNY needs an institutional repository to help faculty and others make their scholarly and creative works open access.  But it’s not just me, and it’s not just about CUNY — here’s a broader, bolder statement from Peter Suber (Harvard) and the Darius Cuplinskas (Open Society Foundations):

Every institution of higher learning should ensure that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles by its faculty members are made open-access through a designated repository that captures the institution’s intellectual output.

“Every institution of higher learning.”

Read more at Open Access to Scientific Research Can Save Lives.  (And yes, the article does give a fantastic concrete example of how open access can save lives.)

Of course, “Open access saves lives” is the flip side of “Closed access means people die.”