1991

Paul Ginsparg founds the arXiv archive for physics preprints at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LAN-L) to make preprints in physics freely available.

1995

During what becomes known as the serials crisis in the 1990s, the rising costs of acquiring scholarly literature lead to a burden on the acquisition budgets of scholarly libraries, and thus, in many cases, to a deterioration in the supply of literature. Besides rising journal prices, the crisis has also been caused by the fact that more and more universities and scientific societies have outsourced the publishing of their publications to commercial publishers. Journal literature is particularly affected, which is why this development is also referred to as the serials crisis. Later, the crisis also takes hold in the area of monographs.

1999

Biomed Central (BMC), the first open access publisher, is founded by Vitek Tracz. In 2008, BMC is sold to Springer.

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI), which promotes the development of technical standards for the interoperability of metadata, is founded.

2001

The first version of the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), an interface for the harvesting of data from repositories, is released.

CERN and the University of Geneva hold the first OAI Workshop. This gives rise to an important conference of the same name in the area of open science, which has been organised every two years in Geneva since then. 

2002

Scholars and scientists join forces in the international and transdisciplinary Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), which has arisen from a meeting of the Open Society Institute (OSI) in Budapest. The 2002 BOAI Declaration states that "the literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment". 

The nonprofit organisation Creative Commons is founded in the United States by Lawrence Lessig and others. It makes several copyright licences, known as Creative Commons licences, available to the public free of charge.

Open Journal Systems, an open source software application for managing and publishing scholarly journals, is released by the Public Knowledge Project in Canada.

SPARC Europe, an alliance of European science and research libraries, national libraries, library associations, and research institutions dedicated to advancing the open access movement, is founded. Its US counterpart, SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), was founded in 1998. 

Sherpa Romeo (today Open Policy Finder) goes online. The database for publisher and journal open access policies aggregates and presents self-archiving permissions and conditions of rights given by publishers to authors of journal articles. It also provides statistics in this regard.

2003

The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing is drafted by representatives of funding agencies, libraries, publishers, and scientists during a meeting on open access publishing held at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Focusing on biomedical research, the statement stresses the need for rapid and efficient dissemination of research results in accordance with the principles of open access. It also emphasises the opportunity (and the obligation) to share research results, ideas, and discoveries freely with the scientific community and the public.

The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities is drafted within the framework of a conference on the development of new Web-based research environments (the first “Berlin Conference”) that was organised by the Max Planck Society and the European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO) project. By signing the declaration, leading European and American research organisations and universities commit to supporting the further development of the notion of open access, for example, by encouraging researchers to publish their results in open access.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is launched at Lund University in Sweden as a central directory for open access journals. The community-curated directory indexes high-quality, peer-reviewed open access journals.

The Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation (German Initiative for Network Information, DINI) launches the first DINI certificate for open access repositories (DINI Certificate for Document and Publication Services). It defines Web standards for publication services in order to ensure that open access literature in repositories is findable, archived, and accessible.

2010

Within the framework of the EU-funded project OAPEN (Open Access in European Networks), the platform of the same name is launched to support and promote the transition to open access for academic books.

The German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) launches the funding programme Open Access Publishing to support the establishment of open access publication funds at German universities, thereby decisively influencing developments in this area. As Fournier and Weihberg (2013) later note, during the transition from the subscription model to an open access model, substantial parts of the libraries’ acquisition budgets continue to be needed to finance licences. Therefore, the restructuring of (at least parts of) this budget, which is necessary to finance the transformation, can get off the ground only if additional funds to finance open access are made available for a limited period of time (p. 237).

2012

The statement of commitment to open access to scholarly journal literature in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) Declaration is reaffirmed. At the same time, recommendations for the implementation of open access are formulated, especially with regard to guidelines, licensing, and open access infrastructure and services and their sustainability.

OAPEN launches the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) for peer-reviewed open access books as a counterpart of DOAJ. Besides metadata, it offers links to full texts of the publications on the websites or in the repositories of the publishers. 

The Finch Report is published. It includes recommendations for UK research funders regarding the implementation of open access. The report strongly advocates promoting and favouring gold rather than green open access. It comes in for criticism because of this (Abadal, 2014), as rising publication costs and the obligation to use a specific licence (CC BY licence) are feared.

The Open Access Network Austria (OANA) is founded under the organisational umbrella of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the Austrian University Conference (UNIKO). The network is renamed Open Science Network Austria in 2018; the acronym remains the same.

2013

The catch-all repository Zenodo is launched. It is funded by the European Commission and maintained by CERN.

2014

With its Strategy for Open Access, the government of the German Federal State (Land) of Schleswig-Holstein endorses and promotes open access to the results of scientific research and the sources of cultural heritage. 

With a position paper on e-science, the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of the German Federal State of Baden-Württemberg drafts a concept for the further development of the scientific infrastructure in the state (Fachkonzept zur Weiterentwicklung der wissenschaftlichen Infrastruktur) that addresses the area of open access, among other things. 

A self-archiving provision is added to the German Copyright Act (Section 38 (4) UrhG). It grants authors the inalienable right to make the accepted manuscript version of their journal articles freely available to the public, for example via an open access repository, 12 months after first publication. This applies when the contribution results from research activities at least half of which were financed by public funds, and the work appeared in a periodical that is published at least twice a year. 

Beneficiaries of the EU research funding programme Horizon 2020 are required to make publications resulting from funded projects available in open access. In addition, there is a requirement to publish the underlying research data in open access. However, there is an opt-out option in this regard (“as open as possible, as closed as necessary”; Landi et al., 2019).

In Austria, one of the first national open access agreements worldwide is concluded. The Austrian Academic Library Consortium (KEMÖ) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) negotiate the agreement with the publisher IOP Publishing. It is followed by further Austrian open access transformation agreements.

The project e-infrastructures Austria is initiated to promote the coordinated development and further development of repository infrastructure in Austria. It is funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy (BMWFW).

2015

The Arbeitskreis Open Access (AKOA), an official working group of the Conference of Swiss University Libraries (KUB/BU; successor: Swiss Library Network for Education and Research, SLiNER), is established. 

The Berlin Senate issues an Open Access Strategy for the Federal State of Berlin. This strategy paper contributes to establishing open access to digital knowledge resources.

With the Fraunhofer Open Access-Strategie 2020, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft unequivocally enshrines the principle of open access when publishing research results.

2021

The first of February 2021 saw the launch of 20 open access projects nationwide within the framework of the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) guideline for the promotion of projects to accelerate the transformation to open access (Richtlinie zur Förderung von Projekten zur Beschleunigung der Transformation zu Open Access). These projects aim to sustainably advance open access as the standard for scholarly publishing

At political level, the SPD, Greens, and FDP included the strengthening of open access and open science in the coalition agreement of the new federal government. In Brandenburg, Open Access Brandenburg started its work to support the state’s higher education institutions on the road to more openness in science.

More and more open access initiatives are being bought up by major publishers. The trend is towards the commercialisation of the open access model by scientific publishing groups – as evidenced, for example, by US scientific publisher Wiley’s acquisition of the pledging platform Knowledge Unlatched.

This development within the scholarly publishing system is not without criticism – especially on the part of various scholar-led initiatives (see Steiner, 2023). In a manifesto, scholar-led.network formulates its members’ central criticism of the “new journal crisis” in the current scientific publishing system and identifies possible fields of action for fair publishing.

Criticism of open access developments is also voiced from physics, the field that took the first steps in open access with the establishment in 1991 of the preprint server arXiv. For example, the German Physical Society (DPG) publishes a critical Position Paper on the Future of Scientific Publishing.

At European level, the role and rights of authors are strengthened: The members of the International Science Council undertake to work towards reform of the publishing system, and they adopt eight fundamental principles to guide them on their way. cOAlition S  develops a Rights Retention Strategy to give researchers the possibility to apply a CC BY licence to author accepted manuscripts or versions of record.

In the same year, the large-scale “OA Diamond Journals Study” (Bosman et al., 2021) is published. Commissioned by cOAlition S, it provides an overview of the current diamond open access journal landscape.

2022

Accompanying Projekt DEAL, the Arbeitskreis Forum 13+ is established, an independent working group of experts from German library consortia that will coordinate the negotiation of transformative agreements between scientific institutions and small and medium-sized publishers or professional associations.

In Germany, publications by various bodies address the topic of open access transformation:

• The BMBF publishes a funding guideline for the promotion of projects to establish a lived culture of open access in German research and scientific practice (Richtlinie zur Förderung von Projekten zur Etablierung einer gelebten Open-Access-Culture in der deutschen Forschungs- und Wissenschaftspraxis), in which it defines as the goal of funding the establishment of a culture in which open access is an inherent part of the scientific knowledge process itself and at the same time contributes to the promotion of social participation.
• The German Science and Humanities Council (WR) also publishes comprehensive Recommendations on the Transformation of Academic Publishing: Towards Open Access, in which it sets gold open access as the target of the transformation. To monitor publishing costs and strategically plan the funding of scientific publishing in the long term, the Council recommends that scientific institutions establish “information budgets” .
• In a position paper entitled “Academic Publishing as a Foundation and Area of Leverage for Research Assessment: Challenges and Fields of Action,” the German Research Foundation (DFG) adopts a position on the tasks of the science system in light of the current challenges facing the academic publishing sector and formulates tasks for science and academia and for funding bodies. It calls inter alia for new forms of quality control, alternative systems of reputational attribution, and the broadening of the spectrum of accepted publication formats.

Diamond open access is further strengthened internationally, and cross-border activities are coordinated: Science Europe, cOAlition S, and the French funding body Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR) launch the “Action Plan for Diamond Open Access” (Ancion et al., 2022). In doing so, they commit to the development of a fair, scholar-led, and sustainable publishing infrastructure. Thus, the Action Plan follows the recommendations of the “OA Diamond Journals Study” (Bosman et al., 2021). The DFG signs the Action Plan on 17 March 2022.

Austria adopts a national Open Science Policy.

2023

The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities Celebrates its 20th birthday.

Projekt DEAL negotiates further transformative agreements for the years 2024–2028 with the publishers Springer Nature and Wiley. The publish-and-read agreements will be funded through the reallocation of former subscription fees. With the newly concluded agreement with Elsevier for the period September 2023–2028, there is now also a transformative agreement with a third major scholarly publisher.

The BMBF and the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs (KMK) publish a paper entitled Open Access in Deutschland – Gemeinsame Leitlinien von Bund und Ländern (Open Access in Germany – Joint Guidelines of the Federal Government and the Länder), in which they underscore the requirement that open access should become standard for publicly funded research and assure their long-term support with regard to legal protection and financial assistance.

The year 2023 also marks the start of a second wave of BMBF-funded open access projects: 24 projects at higher education institutions, non-university research institutions, publishers, and small and medium-sized enterprises nationwide begin their work within the framework of the BMBF guideline for the promotion of projects to establish a lived culture of open access in German research and scientific practice (Richtlinie zur Förderung von Projekten zur Etablierung einer gelebten Open-Access-Kultur in der deutschen Forschungs- und Wissenschaftspraxis). Funding is being provided for a large number of projects aimed at establishing scholar-led financing models, contributing to the recognition of open access in science, and addressing the diverse needs of an open access culture.

The State of Lower Saxony makes 3.4 million euro available for a state-wide open access publication fund, “NiedersachsenOPEN”.

At European level, the Council of the European Union approves conclusions on high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing. The DFG welcomes these conclusions and underscores the standards for scholarly publishing called for therein.

The first Diamond Open Access Global Summit worldwide takes place from 23–27 October in Toluca, Mexico. Jointly organised by numerous international initiatives and organisations (e.g. Science Europe, Redalyc, UAMéx, AmeliCA, UNESCO, CLACSO, UÓR, ANR, cOAlition S, and OPERAS), the Summit brings the diamond open access community from all continents together for the first time.

2024

Switzerland revises its National Open Access Strategy and sets itself a new target – the year 2032 – for the completion of the transformation.

The Dutch Research Council (NOW) makes €500,000 available for the “Diamond Open Access Fund”, a new funding programme dedicated to financing the flipping of journals from the subscription model to an open access model without publication charges for authors.

The business practices of major publishers have long been the subject of criticism. In the United States, an antitrust class action is brought against six major scholarly publishers in relation to some of these practices. The plaintiff, Dr Lucina Uddin, filed the class action on behalf of “all natural persons residing in the United States who performed peer-review services for or submitted a manuscript for publication to the Publisher Defendants” (see Class Action Complaint). The complaint alleges that the publishers Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Sage, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer expect unpaid peer review services, suppress competition, and limit the dissemination of scientific findings. It demands compensation and an end to anti-competitive agreements.

2025

The DFG funds the project SeDOA, a national service point for diamond open access, for an initial period of three years. The project aims to increase the efficiency of diamond open access publishing through better coordination and optimisation of decentralised services and the provision of centralised information and innovation. The project is supported by a consortium of 15 institutions.

As the German Diamond Capacity Centre, the service point is part of a European network. The European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH), which was also established in 2025, is the central European player in this network and the umbrella organisation for national and disciplinary Diamond Capacity Centres. The EDCH will bundle and make available key services for providers of publishing services. It will coordinate initiatives for the networking, quality assurance, and visibility of diamond open access journals and provide training modules and technical infrastructure.zwerks. Zentraler europäischer Akteur in diesem Netzwerk und Dach für nationale und disziplinäre Diamond Capacity Centres ist der ebenfalls 2025 neu gegründete European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH). Die europäische Servicestelle soll wesentliche Dienstleistungen für die Anbieter von Publikationsdiensten bündeln und bereitstellen. Der EDCH koordiniert Initiativen zur Vernetzung, Qualitätssicherung und Sichtbarkeit von Diamond-Open-Access-Zeitschriften, Weiterbildungsangebote  und technischer Infrastruktur.