The first quarter of 2008 has reportedly seen dramatic growth of Open access (OA) publishing, as measured by the number of titles in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). There has been a net growth of 271 titles in DOAJ in the first quarter. This is an average of less than three titles per day, up considerably from last year's average of 1.4 titles per day.
The emergence of new OA publisher Bentham Open is seen to be a significant factor for this acceleration. Even otherwise, there is a net increase of 228 titles this quarter, or an average of 2.5 titles per day. This is nearly double the growth rate of 2007. At this rate, at the end of the next quarter, OA publishing is expected to reach another milestone - 15 percent of scholarly peer-reviewed journals will be fully open access.
With the NIH policy requiring open access to NIH-funded research as of April 7, the PubMedCentral database is projected to gain prominence.
