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.