In October, SPARC Europe convened a meeting with high-level stakeholders from the international funding, research and library communities to discuss how to sustain some of the world’s important OA services. New funding mechanisms are being explored. After extensive essential preparatory work led by Knowledge Exchange, best concluded in the Putting Down Roots report, SPARC Europe now wants to explore the feasibility of the proposal and how to put this into action with leading decision-makers and Open Science advocators worldwide.

From 8th September, DOAJ will accept a short open access statement, but only in combination with a Creative Commons licensing statement on the same page. Likewise, from August 2016, DOAJ no longer accepts journals that require users to register to view the full text.

The Jisc-funded Open Access Good Practice (OAGP) initiative is a community-led support programme which aims to develop and share best practices when implementing open access (OA) workflows, systems and procedures across UK higher education institutions (HEIs). As part of this programme, nine Pathfinder projects were established in 2014. This paper highlights a selection of thoughts and reflections from project members about their experience of participating in the programme.

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.