Timeline of the Open Access Movement

Formerly called the Timeline of the Free Online Scholarship Movement.

For this purpose, the open-access movement is the worldwide effort to provide free online access to scientific and scholarly research literature, especially peer-reviewed journal articles and their preprints. For more information, see my overview, newsletter, or blog.

I've tried to limit the items to landmark events. Entries are brief in order to save space.

I don't aim to include all open-access journals and open-access eprint archives, just the early pioneers that helped to prove the concepts. So far I'm deliberately omitting individual books, articles, and speeches, no matter how important.

For reference, I've inserted a small number of entries on the history of the internet and world wide web, to show how quickly scholars moved to take advantage of the new technology. The dates for these entries are in a green font.

I try to give year, month, and day for each item. When one or more of these details is missing, that means I don't have them. When I know the year, but not the month or day, I list the item at the beginning of the year. When I know the year and month, but not the day, I list the item at the beginning of the month.

Beware of an illusion based on my collection priorities. I know recent developments best, and I'm particularly interested in discovering and recording the earliest stirrings of this movement. So the entries are thickest at the beginning and the end of the timeline. But that doesn't mean there was a decline in the middle period. As I fill in more of the landmark events, this illusion should disappear.

I welcome additions, corrections, and missing details from incomplete dates. If you can help, please let me know.

Peter Suber
Last revised, December 10, 2007.

Before 1990

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007
  • January 2007. The US Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) announced a program to digitize 40 million pages of microfiche documents for OA.
  • January 2007. The University of Amsterdam launched an Open Access fund to help cover publication fees charged by fee-based OA journals.
  • January 4, 2007. Karger Medical and Scientific Publishers announced a hybrid OA program for eight of its journals.
  • January 5, 2007. Emerald launched Emerald Asset (Accessible Scholarship Shared in an Electronic Environment), a no-fee hybrid OA program for its engineering journals.
  • January 8, 2007. UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) was officially launched by a Funders Group of nine institutions. At the same time, eight of the nine members of the Funders Group announced that they do, or will, mandate OA for the research they fund and mandate deposit in UKPMC.
  • January 8, 2007. The UK-based Arthritis Research Campaign (ARC) announced an OA mandate for ARC-funded research.
  • January 8, 2007. The Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Executive Health Department announced an OA mandate for CSO-funded research.
  • January 8, 2007. The UK Department of Health pledged to adopt an OA mandate. I'm not sure when it actually adopted and released its policy, but it was at least by May 2007.
  • January 8, 2007. The British Heart Foundation pledged to adopt an OA mandate. I'm not sure when it actually adopted and released its policy, but it was at least by May 2007.
  • January 8, 2007. Cancer Research UK pledged to adopt an OA mandate. It released its policy on May 21, 2007.
  • January 9, 2007. Open Access Research issued a call for papers and became the first peer-reviewed OA journal devoted to OA itself.
  • January 11, 2007. The University of Michigan Press launched a new OA imprint, Digital Cultural Books. Books in the series will appear in both OA editions and priced, printed editions.
  • January 17, 2007. The UN Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP) added a policy mandating OA to data covered by the convention, with some exceptions.
  • January 10, 2007. The European Research Advisory Board (EURAB) recommended an OA mandate for EU-funded research.
  • January 24, 2007. Nature revealed that the Association of American Publishers (AAP) hired Eric Dezenhall ("the pit bull of public relations") to keep OA proponents "on the defensive" with messages like "public access equals government censorship". Dezenhall reportedly asked for $300,000 - 500,000 for six months of work.
  • January 25, 2007. The Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional del Chile (National Library of Chile) released all its (digital?) content under Creative Commons licenses.
  • January 26, 2007. The European University Association's Working Group on Open Access released a Statement on Open Access, endorsing an EU-wide OA mandate.
  • January 26, 2007. The US Department of Energy (DOE) and the British Library agreed to build an OA portal of world science.
  • January 29, 2007. The Alexandria Archive Institute officially launched Open Context, its OA repository and portal for archaeological data.
  • January 31, 2007. The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) released a positio