Slow progress is being made in providing the public with free full-text biomedical articles.

from : Biomed Central Blog

How open access is your research area?

"Just over a year ago, this blog post introduced the concept of the Open Access Quotient, an easy-to-calculate metric for the fraction of the biomedical literature that is immediately freely accessible in full text form, for a given subject area.

Now seems as good a time as any to revisit this metric, to get a sense of what progress has been made in opening up the literature. Has the growth of open access publishing, and the strengthening of the NIH open access policy, had a measurable impact on the accessibility of research?

Looking at the biomedical literature has a whole, there has clearly been progress. The fraction of recent PubMed abstracts that will link the users straight through to the fulltext, with no permission barrier getting in the way, is up from 6.8% to 8.45%. There's still a long way to go, but that's a lot more immediate open access articles (about 1000 more per month, in fact). "

full article at:

http://blogs.openaccesscentral.com/b...ccess_is_your1