20% of peer-reviewed articles across all disciplines are now freely available. http://elibrarian.grouply.com/message/113 Following study shows that 20% of all peer reviewed articles from all disciplines are now available with open access. This is really a mile stone for library professionals and those who are big supporter of Open Access. Background The Internet has recently made possible the free global availability of scientific journal articles. Open Access (OA) can occur either via OA scientific journals, or via authors posting manuscripts of articles published in subscription journals in open web repositories. So far there have been few systematic studies showing how big the extent of OA is, in particular studies covering all fields of science. Methodology/Principal Findings The proportion of peer reviewed scholarly journal articles, which are available openly in full text on the web, was studied using a random sample of 1837 titles and a web search engine. Of articles published in 2008, 8,5% were freely available at the publishers' sites. For an additional 11,9% free manuscript versions could be found using search engines, making the overall OA percentage 20,4%. Chemistry (13%) had the lowest overall share of OA, Earth Sciences (33%) the highest. In medicine, biochemistry and chemistry publishing in OA journals was more common. In all other fields author-posted manuscript copies dominated the picture. Conclusions/Significance The results show that OA already has a significant positive impact on the availability of the scientific journal literature and that there are big differences between scientific disciplines in the uptake. Due to the lack of awareness of OA-publishing among scientists in most fields outside physics, the results should be of general interest to all scholars. The results should also interest academic publishers, who need to take into account OA in their business strategies and copyright policies, as well as research funders, who like the NIH are starting to require OA availability of results from research projects they fund. The method and search tools developed also offer a good basis for more in-depth studies as well as longitudinal studies. for full article: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0011273 -- Thanks and Regards *-------* Join hands, Join eLibrarian http://elibrarian.grouply.com http://elibrarian.grouply.com%20/ *-------* *Pawan R. Agrawal *Librarian Takshshila Centre for Learning Transpek Silox Industry Ltd. Kalali Road- Atladra Vadodara- 390012 Ph. 9376135580 http://www.pragrawal.wordpress.com http://elibrarian.grouply.com Skype ID: pawanagrawal4u4u -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.