Back of envelope engineering-style estimate (ie very rough):

Assume 25,000 research journals worldwide, 10 articles per issue, 4 issues per year, each article = 200kB on average. Total = 200 x 10⁹, 0.2 PB (Peta-bytes) annually.

Even more crudely, double to allow for all theses, conference articles and books = 0.4 PB annually.

The academic+research world is a small contributor to the quantity of ‘information’ on the Internet. It takes too much time to generate each item! Now if we were asking about quality... But then we would have to address the question of the missing quality information (ie non-OA) as well.

Arthur Sale

-----Original Message-----
From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Leslie Carr
Sent: Wednesday, 16 September 2009 12:17 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Digital Preservation – The Planets Way: 17-19 November 2009, Swiss Federal Archives, Bern, Switzerland

On 15 Sep 2009, at 14:29, Planets Project News Update wrote:

> There has been an explosion in the volume of information world-wide 

> which will grow to 180 exabytes by 2011.

>

Does anyone have any estimates for the amount of information in the 

academic/research world?

--

Les