The growth of open access journals in relation to the publication of scholarly journals

Purpose: Subscription based electronic journals which are contained in the "Big Deal" have become predominant in the publication of scholarly journals, but some people predict that open access journals will take its place. This paper quantitatively examines how the status of open access journals has changed in the publication of scholarly journals, and discusses how the status of open access journals will be going in the near future. Methods: Three kinds of surveys were conducted: 1) The primary source was information on 38,803 journals published by 2011 in STM extracted from Ulrichsweb. The source was used to calculate the ratio of open access journals to the total number of journals in 2011. 2) The second data source was journal price lists and the web sites of five major commercial publishers. Both primary and second sources were used to calculate the ratio of new open access journals and new subscription based journals year by year. 3) The web sites of open access mega journals were used as the third source to check their current status. Results: The major findings were: 1) The ratio of open access journals to the total number of journals in STM was 14% in 2011. 2) The ratio of new open access journals to the total number of journals in STM has risen continuously since 2000. The majority of new open access journals have been launched by open access publishers. Among the major commercial publishers, Nature Publishing Group and Springer have begun to increase the number of new open access journals since 2010–2011. 3) Open access mega journals have been launched one after another since 2011. In conclusion, Open access journals are still not the predominant form of publication of scholarly journals, but the business model has become accepted by publishers.