De Gruyter Open Author Survey has recently shown that authors from less wealthy countries are indeed more likely to publish their works  in gold open access model. There is a strong negative correlation between the share of academic papers published in open access journals and a country’s GDP per capita.

The University of California (UC) Libraries have recently released the final version of the Pay It Forward report, examining the impact on large, research-intensive institutions in the US and Canada of a wholesale shift to gold open access (OA) for journals. The conclusions point a way toward a possible funding model that could introduce the right incentives to both manage costs and improve the system over time, while achieving the benefit of fully open access to research.

The result of the study revealed that 56 % of respondents prefer to seek information through Open Access Digital Repositories , 34 % of the respondents believe that the use of Open Access Digital Repositories while seeking information has increased their academic activities.

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The final text of a law “for a digital Republic” in France has been adopted on June the 29th 2016. It will be submitted to a vote by the National Assembly in July and by the Senate in September.

Article 17 is dedicated to open access issues. It states: “When a scientific article, result of a research activity funded for at least half by the State, local authorities or public institutions, by national agencies or by European Union grant, is published in a journal which comes out at least once a year, his author has the right to provide, even if he has granted an exclusive right to a publisher, a free availability in an open format (…)”.

All scientific articles in Europe must be freely accessible as of 2020. EU member states want to achieve optimal reuse of research data. They are also looking into a European visa for foreign start-up founders. And, according to the new Innovation Principle, new European legislation must take account of its impact on innovation. These are the main outcomes of the meeting of the Competitiveness Council in Brussels on 27 May.

In 25 years, open access has become a significant part of scientific communication. Open access started, together with the web, at the grassroots, as a bottom-up, community-driven model of open journals and repositories. Today the key driving forces are commercial, institutional and political interests. This development serves the needs of the scientific community insofar as more and more content becomes available through open journals and repositories. The fall of open access as a community-driven model is running the risk of becoming dysfunctional for the scientists and may create new barriers and digital divides.

COAR and UNESCO have published a joint statement about open access which outlines some of the concerns around the drive towards APCs. The statement is aimed at policy makers and underscores the need for a variety of OA models to be implemented around the world.

After exposing the many and varied arguments for open access (OA) monographs, the ticklish question of how OA monographs can make money is brought out. Three types of support are considered, together with the potential to reduce the cost of publication sufficiently to lessen the financial requirements of sustainability.

The University of Southern Queensland has delivered a beta search engine for open access journals, using spare capacity on AWS rather than on-campus supercomputers to crunch more than 16 million full-text records. A beta version of the search engine is now live, including traditional search results and a Google Books-style ngram interface.

The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) is strongly committed to Open Access and follows a progressive Open Access policy following the pioneering role of the Netherlands, with the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) becoming the first funding agency in the world to demand that the results of the research projects it funds be made available immediately and without restriction. The SNSF will continue to follow and play an active role in international developments. It supports the Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science 2016, which aims to achieve full open access for all publicly funded scientific publications by 2020.