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, February 9, 2009.

---

• 1966. Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) launched by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement and the National Library of Education.
• 1966. Medline launched by the National Library of Medicine (but not free until 1997).
• April 7, 1969. First Request for Comments (RFC) published by Steve Crocker, triggering a long series of free online documents on the development of the internet. See these details on the history of RFCs.
• August 30, 1969. Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) launched by the U.S. Department of Defense. It ceased operation in 1990. See these details on ARPANET's history.
• 1970. The U.S. National Agriculture Library launched Agricola (AGRICultural OnLine Access).
• July 4, 1971. Project Gutenberg launched by Michael Hart.
• Late 1971. Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email. After the initial test messages, the first message announced the existence of network email. Email-based discussion lists emerged soon after, though I can't tell when. See these details on the history of email discussion lists.
• 1974. The libraries of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY) began electronic cataloging of preprint literature in physics. Their catalog soon joined the Stanford Physics [later Public] Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) High Energy Physics (HEP) online database. See these details on SPIRES HEP's history.
• 1979. USENET launched by Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis, Steve Bellovin, and Steve Daniel. See these details on USENET's history.
• 1981. Joint Academic Network (JANET) launched by JISC.
• May 5, 1981. Because It's Time Network (BITNET) launched with a link between Yale and the City University of New York. See these details on BITNET's history.
• January 1, 1983. ARPANET switched from the NCP protocol to TCP/IP, marking what many consider to be the birth of the internet. See these details on the planning for this transition.
• September 21, 1985. Ronald Reagan's White House issued National Security Decision Directive 189: National Policy On The Transfer Of Scientific, Technical And Engineering Information, holding (inter alia) that "[i]t is the policy of this Administration that, to the maximum extent possible, the products of fundamental research remain unrestricted."
• July 1987. Perseus Project launched on CD's (not free until it moved to the web in 1994).
• Fall 1987. New Horizons in Adult Education launched by the Syracuse University Kellogg Project. (An early free online peer-reviewed journal.) See these details on NHAE's history.
• November 1987. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) was launched by a group of humanities scholars, librarians, and computer scientists at a meeting at Vassar College. See these details on the history of TEI.
• 1989. Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues launched. See these details on NSPI's history.
• 1989. Psycoloquy launched by Stevan Harnad. (An early free online journal that became peer-reviewed on January 28, 1990.) Psycoloquy is sponsored but not published by the American Psychological Association.
• June 1989. Eddy van der Maarel and most of his editorial board resigned from Vegetatio in order to launch the Journal of Vegetation Science. See Declarations of Independence.
• August 16, 1989. The Public-Access Computer Systems Review launched by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. (An early free online journal with a peer-reviewed section starting in April 1992.)

• 1990. Hytelnet launched by Peter Scott. (The first online hypertext internet directory, noted especially for its links to network-accessible library catalogues.)
• September 21, 1990. Electronic Journal of Communication launched. (An early free online peer-reviewed journal.) See these details on EJC's history.
• September 30, 1990. Postmodern Culture launched by Eyal Amiran, Greg Dawes, Elaine Orr, and John Unsworth. (An early free online peer-reviewed journal.) See these details on PMC's history.
• October 1990. Tim Berners-Lee wrote first web client and server (released March 1991). On November 12, 1990, Berners-Lee published WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project, and on November 13, 1990, he wrote the first web page.
• November 1990. Bryn Mawr Classical Review launched. (An early free online peer-reviewed journal.) See these details on BMCR's history.

• 1991. Gopher launched by Paul Lindner and Mark McCahill.
• 1991. Surfaces launched by Jean-Claude Guédon. (An early free online peer-reviewed journal.)
• February 4, 1991. Behavioral and Brain Sciences (not an open-access journal) launched an open-access FTP Preprints archive containing accepted papers but not their accompanying commentaries and responses. This became an open-access web archive in 1993 and an OAI-compliant eprint archive, BBSPrints, in 1999.
• April 1991. EJournal launched by Edward M. Jennings. (An early free online peer-reviewed journal.) See these details on EJ's history.
• May 17, 1991. World Wide Web standard released by CERN and Tim Berners-Lee.
• July 2, 1991. Allan Bromley enunciated what are now known as the "Bromley Principles" Regarding Full and Open Access to "Global Change" Data in Policy Statements on Data Management for Global Change Research, U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy, July 2, 2001.
• July 10, 1991. The Mathematical Physics Preprint Archive or mp_arc was launched by H. Koch, R. de la Llave, and C. Radin at the University of Texas at Austin.
• August 16, 1991. arXiv launched by Paul Ginsparg.

• 1992. Computer Science Technical Reports (CS-TR) launched. The project ended in 1996. See these details on CS-TR's history.
• 1992. Entrez launched by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (on CD's, not free until 1993).
• 1992. GenBank launched by the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
• 1992. Ibiblio launched, originally as the SunSite repository of public domain source code. It adopted its current name in September 2000.
• March 1992. The Logic Journal of the IGPL launched by the Interest Group in Pure and Applied Logics. (An early free online peer-reviewed journal.)
• April 27, 1992. First Symposium on Scholarly Publishing on the Electronic Networks: Visions and Opportunities in Not-for-Profit Publishing [no web site], sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and the Association of American University Presses.
• December 5-8, 1992. Second Symposium on Scholarly Publishing on the Electronic Networks: Visions and Opportunities in Not-for-Profit Publishing, sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and the Association of American University Presses.
• December 13, 1992. Project Runeberg launched by Sweden's Linköping University.

• 1993. The Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive (ASEDA) was launched on gopher by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. A web edition appeared in 1994.
• 1993. Bioline Publications was launched by Biostrategy Associates in partnership with Brazil's Reference Center on Environmental Information. In 2000 management was transferred to the University of Toronto Libraries and the service was relaunched Bioline International. BI used a mix of open access and toll access until February 2004, when it went completely open access. See these details on BI's history.
• 1993. Network Entrez launched, replacing priced CD's with free network access (pre-web).
• 1993. Christian Classics Ethereal Library launched by Harry Platinga.
• January 1993. Project Bartleby launched by Steven H. van Leeuwen.
• January 14, 1993. The Langley Technical Report Server (an open FTP service for research papers) was launched by NASA's Langley Research Center. A WAIS server was added on February 10, 1993. The web version was launched in August 1993. See these details on LTRS's history, and these details on the web version.
• January 19, 1993. Education Policy Analysis Archives launched by Gene Glass. (An early free online peer-reviewed journal.)
• February 1993. National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and Marc Andreesen released the alpha version of Mosaic.
• February 1, 1993. Working Papers in Economics (WoPEc) launched by Thomas Krichel.
• April 1993. Project MUSE launched by the Milton S. Eisenhower Library and the Johns Hopkins University Press. PM is not open access but it was a pioneer in online distribution. It provided free online full-text searching and JHU Press allowed authors to retain copyright.
• April 1993. Association des Bibliophiles Universels (ABU) launched by Pierre Cubaud.
• April 30, 1993. CERN announced that it was putting the basic web software into the public domain, relinquishing all intellectual property rights to it, and granting permission for all to "use, duplicate, modify and redistribute" it without charge. The signatures on this historic document are W. Hoogland, Director of Research, and H. Weber, Director of Administration.
• May 1993. The Unified Computer Science Technical Report Index (UCSTRI) launched by Marc VanHeyningen and Indiana University. See these details on UCSTRI's history.
• June 1993. The Online Books Page launched by John Mark Ockerbloom.
• August 1993. The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy launched by Indiana University. (An early free online peer-reviewed journal.)
• November 1993. CERN launched its preprint server.

• 1994. Digital Libraries Initiative launched by the National Science Foundation and other U.S. federal agencies.
• 1994. HighWire Press launched by the Stanford University Libraries (fall or winter).
• 1994. The Human Genome Project launched its open-access web site. The research project began in 1990. See these details on the history of the HGP.
• 1994. Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (NCSTRL) launched by DARPA and NSF, merging the two prior projects, CS-TR and WATERS. NCSTRL was suspended in 2001, but might be revived in an OAI-compliant form. See these details and these on NCSTRL's history.
• 1994. Perseus Project launched its free web version (formerly limited to priced CD's).
• 1994. Projekt Gutenberg-DE launched by Gunter Hille.
• January 16, 1994. Wide Area Technical Report Service (WATERS) launched on the web by the Computer Science Departments of Old Dominion University, SUNY Buffalo, University of Virginia, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. (It emerged from discussions at the 1992 Snowbird Conference for Computer Science Department Heads and may have had a pre-web incarnation but I'm still investigating that.) See these details on WATERS' history.
• March 1994. The National Academies Press started the practice of creating free online full-text editions of all its priced, printed books, and documenting that the former help sell the latter.
• June 1994. NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS) launched by NASA, to search the many distributed LTRS-inspired digital libraries at the agency. The NTRS became OAI-compliant in May 2003.
• June 27, 1994. Self-archiving first proposed by Stevan Harnad. (Also see Harnad's reflections 10 years later.)
• July 1994. Electronic Green Journal launched by the University of Idaho Library. (An early free online peer-reviewed journal.) See these details on the history of EGJ.
• September 1994. NASA's Astrophysical Data System (ADS) was folded into NTRS.
• September 1994. Electronic Journal of Sociology launched. (An early free online peer-reviewed journal.)
• October 1994. The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) launched by Wayne Marr and Michael Jensen. See these details on the history of SSRN.
• November 28, 1994. Florida Entomologist, a print journal launched in 1917, converted to open access. By April 27, 1999, all back issues to 1917 were also open access.

• 1995. Jusline, an open access portal to German law and legal scholarship, launched by Norbert Gugerbauer.
• April, 1995. Information Research launched by T.D. Wilson. (An early free online peer-reviewed journal.)
• May 21, 1995. HighWire Press announced its first hosted or co-published journal, the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
• June 1995. The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory launched its preprint server. See these details on the project's history.
• June 1995. The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication launched by Indiana University. (An early free online peer-reviewed journal.)
• July 1995. D-Lib Magazine launched.
• September 1995. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy launched by Edward Zalta.
• Fall 1995. Making of America launched by the University of Michigan and Cornell University with funding from the Mellon Foundation.

• 1996. Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT) launched.
• 1996. The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures launched. (An early free online peer-reviewed journal.)
• 1996. Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) launched by Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
• January 1, 1996. The Journal of Clinical Investigation converted to open access (witout using this term). It had been published since 1926 by the American Society for Clinical Investigation. (An early free online peer-reviewed journal.)
• February 1996. Romanticism on the Net launched by Michael Eberle-Sinatra. (An early free online peer-reviewed journal.)
• February 28, 1996. Participants at the International Strategy Meeting on Human Genome Sequencing issued the Bermuda principles, asserting that "all human genomic sequence information, generated by centres funded for large-scale human sequencing, should be freely available and in the public domain". The U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) adopted the Bermuda principles as policy for all US-funded research on April 9, 1996.
• May 10, 1996. The Nordic Journal of Philosophical Logic published its first issue. (An early free online peer-reviewed journal with a priced print edition.) It had to cease publishing its open-access edition in January 2003.
• June 1996. Brewster Kahle launched the Internet Archive.
• October 25, 1996. Version 1 of Charles W. Bailey, Jr.'s Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography appeared. (The first online edition of a bibliography with earlier electronic editions.) See these details on SEPB's history.

• 1997. Die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Society) launched a retrospective digitization project for library holdings that eventually became the Göttinger Digitalisierungs-Zentrum (Goettingen Digitization Center).
• March 1997. SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) was launched by the São Paulo Science Foundation (FAPESP) and the Latin America and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information (BIREME). See these details on SciELO's history.
• March 21, 1997. The Making of America digital library at the University of Michigan first announced in a message from John Price-Wilkin to the DigLib mailing list.
• March 25, 1997. University Provosts' Initiative launched.
• May 12, 1997. Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) launched by Thomas Krichel.
• June 26, 1997. The National Center for Biotechnology Information launched PubMed. At the same time, Medline content, already online, became free when incorporated into PubMed. See these details on the launch.
• August 19, 1997. CogPrints launched by Stevan Harnad.
• September 1997. Slashdot launched by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. Many consider Slashdot to be the first blog.
• September 1997. CiteSeer (sometimes called ResearchIndex) launched by Kurt Bollacker, Lee Giles, and Steve Lawrence of NEC Research Institute. The research project began in June 1997; it became operational within NEC in September 1997; and it opened to the public in the spring of 1998.

• 1998. Campaign for the Freedom of Distribution of Scientific Work (aka Free Science Campaign) launched by Stefano Ghirlanda.
• 1998. The International Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publication (ICAAP) launched.
• 1998. Most of the editorial board of the Journal of Academic Librarianship resigned in order to launch Portal: Libraries and the Academy. (FOSN for 10/26/01.) See Declarations of Independence.
• January 1998. A group of classics scholars launched Suda On Line, a collaborative open-access translation of the 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia.
• March 27, 1998. Declaration of San José issued. (FOSN for 1/30/02.)
• May 1998. African Journals Online (AJOL) launched by the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publication (INASP).
• June 1998. Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) launched by ARL.
• August 25, 1998. The September98Forum (later called the American Scientist Open Access Forum) launched by American Scientist, moderated by Stevan Harnad.
• August 4, 1998. Manifesto for Responsible Scholarly Publishers released by Stephen Boyd and others on the Stanford Academic Council Committee on Libraries.
• September 1998. Computing Research Repository (CoRR) launched by the ACM, arXiv, NCSTRL, and AAAI.
• October 1998. The National Electronic Article Repository (NEAR) proposed by David Shulenburger.
• November 1998. Michael Rosenzweig and the rest of his editorial board resigned from Evolutionary Ecology in order to create Evolutionary Ecology Research. See Declarations of Independence.

• 1999. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) is launched. See these details on the history of the OAI.
• 1999. The Open Citation Project (OpCit) is launched.
• 1999. Electronic Information for Libraries Direct (eIFL Direct) launched by the Open Society Institute.
• April 22, 1999. Jointly Administered Knowledge Environment (jake) launched by the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at the Yale University School of Medicine.
• April 26, 1999. BioMed Central announced plan to offer free online access to all its journals. See these details on the history of BMC.
• May 5, 1999. E-Biomed proposed by Harold Varmus. See these details on the history of E-Biomed.
• July 1, 1999. Declaration on Science and the Use of Scientific Knowledge issued by the UNESCO-ICSU World Conference on Science.
• October 21, 1999. The Universal Preprint Service (UPS) prototype was unveiled for study and discussion at the Sante Fe meeting (October 21-22, 1999). The UPS eventually evolved into the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). See these details on the history of the UPS.
• October 22, 1999. Sante Fe Convention issued. See these details on the history of the Sante Fe Convention.
• November 1999. The entire 50 person editorial board of the Journal of Logic Programming resigned in order to launch Theory and Practice of Logic Programming. (FOSN for 5/11/01.) See Declarations of Independence.
• December 1999. The American Physical Society, publisher of physics journals, launched its own mirror of arXiv.

• 2000. The Cross-Archive Searching Service (ARC) is launched.
• January 2000. Henry Hagedorn resigned (to take effect in July 2000) as editor of the Archives of Insect Biochemistry & Physiology in order to launch the Journal of Insect Science. See Declarations of Independence.
• February 2000. PubMed Central (free full-text articles) launched to supplement PubMed (free citations and abstracts). See these details on the history of PubMed Central.
• May 10, 2000. Tempe Principles For Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing issued.
• May 16, 2000. Collection of Open Digital Archives (CODA) launched by the CalTech Library System. (Named "Caltech CODA" in September 2002.)
• July 11, 2000. A United Nations Economic and Social Council ministerial declaration called for "universal access to knowledge and information" (Section 15).
• July 19, 2000. BioMed Central published its first free online article.
• September 29, 2000. Southampton University released Eprints, its OAI-compliant software for eprint archiving.

• 2001. A handful of editors of Topology and Its Applications resigned in order to launch Algebraic and Geometric Topology. See Declarations of Independence.
• 2001. Electronic Society for Social Science (ELSSS) launched by Manfredi La Manna.
• 2001. Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (NCSTRL) re-launched.
• January 2001. Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information (PERI) launched by INASP.
• January 15, 2001. Wikipedia launched by Jimmy Wales. (See these details and these on Wikipedia's history.)
• March 23, 2001. The letter to the editor that launched the Public Library of Science (PLoS) was published in Science Magazine. See these details on the history of PLoS.
• March 28, 2001. Free Online Scholarship Newsletter (FOSN) launched by Peter Suber. Called the SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN) since July 4, 2003. The back issues are readable and searchable by non-subscribers.
• April 27, 2001. Declaration of Havana issued. (FOSN for 1/23/02.)
• June 2, 2001. Ellen Roche died. (FOSN for 8/23/01.)
• September 1, 2001. The Australian National University launched its E-Print Repository, the first OAI-compliant institutional archive in Australia.
• September 1, 2001. The deadline set in the open letter from the Public Library of Science for science journals to agree to put their full contents online in public archives without charge.
• October 8, 2001. Forty editors of Machine Learning issued a public letter explaining their resignations (which took place over the previous nine months). One of those resigning, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, created the Journal of Machine Learning Research. (FOSN for 10/12/01, 10/19/01.) See Declarations of Independence.
• October 21, 2001. The Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine.
• December 3, 2001. SciDev launched by Nature, Science, and the Third World Academy of Sciences. (FOSN for 1/23/02.)
• December 9, 2001. The French Académie des Sciences issued a public statement calling on the European Commission not to apply ordinary copyright rules to scientific publications for which the authors seek no payment. (FOSN for 2/14/02.)
• December 10, 2001. Citebase is launched by Tim Brody and Southampton University.

• January 1, 2002. BioMed Central started charging processing fees to cover the costs of free online access. (FOSN for 12/19/01, 12/26/01, 1/1/02.)
• January 31, 2002. HINARI started delivering free online content. (FOSN for 2/25/02.)
• February 6, 2002. The International Scholarly Communications Alliance (ISCA) launched. (FOSN for 2/14/02.)
• February 14, 2002. Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) launched by the Open Society Institute. (FOSN for 2/14/02.)
• February 25, 2002. OAIster launched by the University of Michigan Libraries Digital Library Production Services.
• May 2002. Africa's Open Knowledge Network launched.
• May 15, 2002. Creative Commons launched by Lawrence Lessig.
• May 26, 2002. The FOS News blog launched by Peter Suber. Called Open Access News since June 28, 2003.
• April, 2002. The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) launched its scholarly communication initiative.
• April 3, 2002. eScholarship Repository launched by the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library.
• July 1, 2002. BioMed Central launched its Open Access Charter, assuring open access to its journal contents for the long-term, even after any future changes of ownership.
• July 1, 2002. Eprints, the archiving software, went open source and affiliated with GNU.
• July 1, 2002. Ingenta announced its plan to create a commercial version of the eprints software and offer OAI eprint services.
• August 1, 2002. Eprints-UK launched by JISC-FAIR.
• August 1, 2002. Project RoMEO (Rights MEtadata for Open archiving) launched by JISC-FAIR.
• August 1, 2002. Project SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) launched by JISC-FAIR.
• August 1, 2002. Project TARDIS (Targeting Academic Research for Deposit and Disclosure) launched by JISC-FAIR.
• August 15, 2002. CERN released CDSWare, its OAI-compliant open-source software for document servers.
• August 23, 2002. IFLA published the IFLA Internet Manifesto calling for "freedom of access to information" and the removal of "barriers to the flow of information". See December 2006 below for guidelines to implement the manifesto.
• September 30, 2002. MIT officially launched the OpenCourseWare project. It had been publicly announced as early as April 2001. See these details and these on OCW's history.
• October 3, 2002. Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) meeting at the Montreal Law via Internet Conference issued the Montreal Declaration on Free Access to Law. The Declaration was slightly revised at the LIIs November 2003 meeting in Sydney.
• October 28, 2002. Over 300 University of California Press books are made freely available online as eScholarship Editions, through a partnership with the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library.
• October 31, 2002. DARE launched by the Dutch government.
• November 4, 2002. MIT released DSpace, its OAI-compliant open-source software for archiving eprints and other academic content.
• November 4, 2002. PubSCIENCE was discontinued by the U.S. federal government in response to lobbying by commercial publishers.
• November 6, 2002. Bonn statement issued by the German university rectors.
• November 8, 2002. The Public Knowledge Project released Open Journal Systems, its open-source journal management and publishing software.
• December 17, 2002. The Public Library of Science received a $9 million grant from the Moore Foundation for open-access publishing and announced its first two open-access journals.
• December 17, 2002. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute committed itself to cover the publication costs when its researchers published in fee-based open-access journals, apparently the first foundation or funding agency to do so.

• 2003. ASCUS (Academic Serials in Communication Unified System) launched by a group of universities, libraries, and societies. The goal is to create an online database of free and affordable society journals in the field of communications.
• January 15, 2003. In Eldred v. Ashcroft, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that legislation retroactively extending the term of copyright, or pirating from the public domain, is constitutional.
• January 23, 2003. The University of Southampton Department of Electronics and Computer Science adopted a policy that faculty research "is to be" on deposit in one of the department's four open-access repositories.
• January 29, 2003. The Budapest Open Access Initiative published two business guides for open-access publishing, one for launching new open-access journals and one for converting traditional journals to open access, each written by Raym Crow and Howard Goldstein.
• January 31, 2003. SPARC published the SPARC Institutional Repository Checklist & Resource Guide, by Raym Crow.
• February 14, 2003. The BOAI Forum was launched by the Budapest Open Access Initiative.
• February 26, 2003. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) adopted its Data Sharing Policy.
• April 14, 2003. The Royal Society released a report, Keeping science open, advocating intellectual property law reforms (in copyright, patents, and database rights) to widen access to scientific publications and remove obstacles to the process of scientific inquiry.
• May 1, 2003. FEDORA (Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture) version 1.0 was launched by the University of Virginia and Cornell University. See these details, and these, on the history of FEDORA.
• May 12, 2003. The Directory of Open Access Journals launched by Lund University with funding from the Open Society Institute and SPARC. (First announced February 14, 2003, but not officially launched until May 12.)
• June 17, 2003. JISC bought 15-month institutional memberships in BioMed Central for all 180 universities in the UK. The memberships begin July 1. See these details on the purchase.
• June 20, 2003. The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing is released.
• June 26, 2003. Rep. Martin O. Sabo (D-MN) introduced the Public Access to Science Act (HR 2613).
• July 1, 2003. Public Knowledge launched its Open Access Project.
• July 3, 2003. Leon Fink and rest of his editorial board resigned from Labor History in order to launch the journal Labor. See Declarations of Independence.
• July 4, 2003. The SPARC Open Access Forum (SOAF) launched by SPARC, moderated by Peter Suber.
• August 28, 2003. The ACRL (Association of College & Research Libraries) released its Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication, endorsing open access.
• September 2003. Queensland University of Technology (QUT) adopted a policy that faculty research "is to be" on deposit in the QUT open-access repository. The policy took effect on January 1, 2004. This is the first university-level open-access mandate.
• September 29, 2003. The Company of Biologists announced a one-year experimental hybrid open-access model for its three journals.
• October 1, 2003. A group of library associations and public-interest advocacy organizations launched the Open Access Working Group.
• October 1, 2003. The Wellcome Trust issued a postion statement and research report endorsing open access. (SOAN for 10/2/03.)
• October 7, 2003. The Medical Library Association issued its Statement on Open Access.
• October 13, 2003. The Public Library of Science launched its first open-access journal, PLoS Biology. (SOAN for 11/2/03.)
• October 19, 2003. The Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) issued the Beijing Declaration on scientific advancement, openness, and cooperation.
• October 21, 2003. PubMed Central became OAI-compliant (details).
• October 22, 2003. The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was released by the Max Planck Society and European Cultural Heritage Online. (SOAN for 11/2/03.)
• October 27, 2003. The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) released a public statement on open access. (It is dated August 27, 2003, apparently the date the ALPSP board adopted it, but it was not released until October 27.) It is brief, but notable for encouraging society publishers to experiment with open access.
• December 4, 2003. The Interacademy Panel on International Issues (IAP), a consortium of science academies from around the world, issued a statement on Access to Scientific Information. The statement endorses some open-access initiatives without using the term "open access".
• December 10, 2003. The UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee launched an inquiry into the prices and accessibility of scientific journals, including the question whether the government should support open-access journals.
• December 12, 2003. The UN World Summit on the Information Society approved a Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action that contained explicit, if brief, endorsements of open access to scientific information.
• December 25, 2003. Stevan Harnad launched the Institutional Self-Archiving Policy Registry.
• December 31, 2003. The entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms resigned in order to launch Transactions on Algorithms. See Declarations of Independence.

• January 2004. Twenty-five journal editors and the World Health Organization released the public statement, Galvanising Mental Health Research in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Role of Scientific Journals. One of its recommendations is that journals provide open access to their contents.
• January 15, 2004. The Valparaiso Declaration for Improved Scientific Communication in the Electronic Medium released in Chile.
• January 20, 2004. The National Library of Canada (NLC) started providing open access to doctoral dissertations on deposit at Theses Canada.
• January 27, 2004. The entire editorial board of Les cahiers du numérique resigned in order protest the journal's high price and limited online access policy. See Declarations of Independence.
• January 30, 2004. Ministerial representatives from 34 nations to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) issued the Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding (scroll down to Annex 1). Also see the subsequent work of the drafters, The Public Domain of Digital Research Data.
• February 9, 2004. France's Institut Jean Nicod adopted a policy asking faculty to self-archive their preprints and postprints.
• February 24, 2004. The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) released the IFLA Statement on Open Access to Scholarly Literature and Research Documentation. This statement was adopted by the IFLA Governing Board on December 5, 2003, but not published until February 24, 2004.
• March 16, 2004. A group of 48 non-profit publishers issued the Washington D.C. Principles for Free Access to Science. (See SOAN for 4/2/04.)
• March 26, 2004. The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) released the ALPSP Principles of Scholarship-Friendly Journal Publishing Practice.
• April 28, 2004. Google and CrossRef announced the pilot of CrossRef Search.
• May 14, 2004. Participants at the 8° Congresso Nacional de Bibliotecários Arquivistas e Documentalistas (Estoril, Portugal) issued the Declaração do Estoril sobre o Acesso à Informação.
• May 21, 2004. Participants at the 2nd Simposio Internaciaonal Bibliotecas Digitais (II SIBD or International Digital Libraries Symposium) in Campinas, Brazil, on May 21, 2004 issued a statement in support of open access.
• May 25, 2004. The Australian Group of Eight, the country's eight leading research universities, released a Statement on open access to scholarly information.
• June 3, 2004. Elsevier announced its new policy permitting authors to post the final editions of their full-text Elsevier articles to their personal web sites or institutional repositories. The policy was officially announced on June 3 but first publicized on May 27. (See SOAN for 6/2/04 and 7/2/04.)
• June 3, 2004. The Directory of Open Access Journals started offering article-level searching of participating journals in its index.
• June 5, 2004. The Special Libraries Association released a Statement Regarding Open Access.
• June 15, 2004. The European Commission launched an inquiry into the system for publishing European research. Among the major topics are rapidly rising journal prices and open access to research findings.
• June 19, 2004. The British Columbia Library Association adopted A Resolution on Open Access.
• July 3, 2004. Springer launched its Open Choice hybrid journal program.
• July 5, 2004. The Göttingen Declaration on Copyright for Education and Research is published by the Coalition for Action. See the institutional signatories.
• July 14, 2004. The U.S. House Appropriations Committee adopted language proposing that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) require open access to NIH-funded research through deposit in the NIH's PubMed Central. (See my FAQ on the plan and SOAN for 8/2/04.) The NIH adopted such a policy on February 3, 2005, and it went into effect on May 2, 2005 (both below).
• July 20, 2004. The U.K. House of Commons Science and Technology Committee issued a lengthy report based on its inquiry into journal prices and open access. The report recommended that public funding agencies require open access to publicly-funded research through deposit in the authors' institutional repositories. It also recommended further study of the upfront funding model for open-access journals. (See SOAN for 8/2/04.)
• August 24, 2004. A large number of U.S. public-interest groups launched the Alliance for Taxpayer Access to support open access to taxpayer-funded research.
• August 26, 2004. Twenty-five Nobel laureates from the U.S. wrote an open letter to the U.S. Congress in support of the NIH open-access plan.
• August 28, 2004. Participants in the First Social Forum on Information, Documentation and Libraries (Buenos Aires, August 26-28, 2004) issued the Declaration from Buenos Aires On information, documentation and libraries.
• September 3, 2004. The U.S. National Institutes of Health released its open-access plan, Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information, for a 60 day period of public comment. On September 17 the same text was published in the Federal Register for another 60 day period of public comment. On February 3, 2005, the NIH published the final version of the policy. On May 2, 2005, it went into effect. (See my FAQ for more details on the procedural history of this policy.)
• September 8, 2004. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) issued a public statement calling for an open-access registry and database of drug trial data, and announcing that its member journals would not publish research articles based on unregistered drug trials.
• September 8, 2004. A panel of the National Research Council concluded that the benefits of open access to genome data on pathogens outweigh the risk of misuse by terrorists. See the panel's press release and full report.
• October 5, 2004. Sage Publications adopted a new policy to allow its authors to deposit their postprints on open-access institutional repositories without case-by-case permission.
• October 6, 2004. Google officially launched Google Print, which eventually differentiated into the Google Publisher program (book scanning with the consent of publishers) and the Google Library program (book scanning with the consent of libraries and not necessarily the consent of publishers). Prior to the official launch, the beta was publicly revealed as early as December 2003.
• October 11, 2004. The Scottish Science Information Strategy Working Group released the Scottish Declaration of Open Access. While signed and released on October 11, 2004, it was not made official until March 14, 2005.
• October 18, 2004. The Public Library of Science launched its second open-access journal, PLoS Medicine.
• November 5, 2004. Thirty-two Italian university rectors signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge and released the Messina Declaration.
• November 15, 2004. The American Institute of Physics (AIP) adopted its Author Select hybrid journal program.
• November 18, 2004. Google announced the launch of Google Scholar.
• November 19, 2004. The third IUCN World Conservation Congress (Bangkok, November 17-25) released the Conservation Commons Statement of Principles calling for open access to biodiversity data and knowledge.
• December 1, 2004. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced an open-access and interoperability policy for taxpayer-funded weather, water, and climate data. The new policy was opposed by private, for-profit weather services.
• December 1, 2004. Participants at the conference on Ocean Biodiversity Informatics (Hamburg, November 29 - December 2, 2004) issued the Ocean Biodiversity Informatics conference statement calling for free and open sharing of data.
• December 6, 2004. Portugal's University of Minho adopted a policy mandating that its faculty deposit their research (with a few exceptions), and that grad students deposit their theses and dissertations, in the university's open-access repository. The policy took effect on January 1, 2005
• December 14, 2004. Google announced its project to digitize and index millions of public-domain and copyrighted books from five major libraries.
• December 17, 2004. The Australian Research Information Infrastructure Committee (ARIIC) issued its Open Access Statement.

• January 2005. Participants at the ENBI-GBIF Digitisation Workshop (Chania, Greece, January 2005) formulated a Statement On Free And Open Data Access, a revised version of the Ocean Biodiversity Informatics Conference Statement issued in Hamburg on December 1, 2004. The statement was not "released" until March 14, 2005, or "issued" until October 3, 2005. The ENBI is the European Network for Biodiversity Information, and the GBIF is the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.
• January 1, 2005. Creative Commons officially launched Science Commons.
• January 26, 2005. Several U.S. and international library associations released their Library-Related Principles for the International Development Agenda of the World Intellectual Property Organization.
• February 3, 2005. The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) released its long-awaited public-access policy. (See SOAN for 2/2/05.)
• February 24, 2005. Blackwell Publishing launched its Online Open hybrid journal program.
• March 1, 2005. Participants in the Berlin3 conference issued a recommendation that institutions wishing to implement the Berlin Declaration on Open Access should "require their researchers to deposit a copy of all their published articles in an open access repository" and "encourage their researchers to publish their research articles in open access journals where a suitable journal exists and provide the support to enable that to happen." Such institutions needn't re-word or re-sign the Berlin Declaration, but merely register their commitment and describe their policies.
• March 5, 2005. SPARC officially launched its Author's Addendum to help authors modify publishing contracts and retain the rights they need to authorize open access.
• March 18, 2005. The Open Access Scientific Publishing Committee of the Finnish Ministry of Education issued a report (in Finnish) endorsing open access and making recommendations for nationwide support and adoption. There is an English-language abstract.
• April 2005. The European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations (EBLIDA) issued a Statement Towards an Effective Scientific Publishing System for European Research, endorsing open access.
• May 2005. The Petition for Open Data in Crystallography is launched by the Crystallography Open Database Advisory Board.
• May 2, 2005. The NIH Public Access Policy went into effect. (See my FAQ for details on the procedural history of this policy.)
• May 15, 2005. Scholars from Vienna's Universitätslehrgang für Informationsrecht und Rechtsinformation publish the Vienna Declaration: 10 Theses on Freedom of Information.
• May 20, 2005. The Electronic Geophysical Year published the Declaration for a Geoscience Information Commons
• June 2005. The Russell Group, representing 19 major research universities that receive 60% of the research grants in the UK, issued a statement endorsing open access.
• June 17, 2005. The Canadian Library Association adopted a resolution endorsing open access. (Scroll to the appendix.)
• June 28, 2005. The Research Councils UK released its draft open-access policy for a period of public comment to end on August 31, 2005. The policy would mandate open access to virtually all publicly-funded research in the UK. (SOAN for 7/2/05.)
• July 1, 2005. Oxford University Press launched its Oxford Open hybrid journal program.
• July 21, 2005. The University of Zurich adopted an open-access mandate.
• August 16, 2005. Springer created the position of Director of Open Access and appointed Jan Velterop, former publisher of BioMed Central. Springer became the first major commercial publisher to have such a position.
• August 20, 2005. The Open Knowledge Foundation Network published a manifesto, Open Access to State-Collected Geospatial Data.
• September 1, 2005. CODATA announced the launch of the Global Information Commons for Science.
• September 2, 2005. The Boston Library Consortium adopted an Agreement to Extend Author’s Rights and plans to use it on member campuses to educate faculty about their rights and help them retain the rights they need to authorize open access.
• September 8, 2005. Universities UK, representing all UK universities, issued a statement endorsing open access and the draft RCUK open-access policy.
• September 15, 2005. CalPIRG (California Public Interest Research Group) endorsed open access.
• September 22, 2005. UNESCO adopted Amendments to the Draft Programme and Budget for 2006-2007 that explicitly endorsed open access.
• September 23, 2005. Participants at the 9th World Congress on Health Information and Libraries, Commitment to Equity (Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, September 20-23, 2005) issued two declarations on access to knowledge. The first, The Declaration of Salvador - Commitment to Equity, asks governments to promote equitable and open access. The second, The Salvador Declaration on Open Access: The Developing World Perspective, asks governments to require open access to publicly-funded research.
• September 30, 2005. The International Association for Media and Communication Research proposed the International Researchers' Charter for adoption at the November 2005 WSIS meeting in Tunis.
• October 1, 2005. The Wellcome Trust started implementing its new open-access mandate for Wellcome-funded research.
• October 3, 2005. The Internet Archive and an international group of for-profit and non-profit partners launched the Open Content Alliance.
• October 13, 2005. The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce published the Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation and Intellectual Property, which articulated a positive vision of intellectual property and endorsed open access.
• December 2005. France's Institut Géographique National published a report recommending open access to France's publicly-funded geodata.
• December 1, 2005. The Ukrainian Parliament adopted a resolution identifying open access as a national priority (Ukranian text, English summary).
• December 14, 2005. Senators Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) and Thad Cochran (R-MS) introduced the American Center for CURES Act of 2005, which would mandate open access to publicly-funded medical research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Agency for Healthcare Research.

• January 2006. The European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) published its Statement on Open Access.
• January 7, 2006. The session on open access at the 93rd Indian Science Congress (Hyderabad, January 3-7, 2006) produced an Optimal National Open Access Policy for India. Among other things, it calls for mandating open access to the results of publicly-funded research.
• January 16, 2006. The Governing Board of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) adopted a Recommendation On Open Access To Biodiversity Data, reaffirming and extending its open access statement from last year (listed above under January 2005).
• January 20, 2006. In its Cyberinfrastructure Vision For 21st Century Discovery, version 5.0, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) endorsed open access to data.
• January 27, 2006. The University of Nottingham (UK) and Lund University (Sweden) officially launched OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories).
• January 27, 2006. MIT developed its Copyright Amendment Form to help authors retain the rights they need to authorize open access.
• January 30, 2006. Germany's Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, DFG) adopted a policy that grantees "should" provide open access to DFG-funded research. (See SOAN for 4/2/06.)
• February 1, 2006. Scholarpedia launched, blending the openness of Wikipedia with expert authors, attribution, and anonymous, expert peer review.
• February 17, 2006. Public GeoData launched an online petition calling for open access to publicly-funded geodata in Europe.
• February 27, 2006. Informatics India launched Open J-Gate, a searchable portal of open-access journals.
• February 21, 2006. Queensland University of Technology created an Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law project. The official launch took place November 29-30, 2006.
• March 2006. The Academy of Science of South Africa wrote a report recommending both green and gold open access. See especially Recommendation 6, which would use public funds to pay processing fees at open-access journals, launch a network of open-access repositories, and harvest the repositories
• March 9, 2006. Charles Arthur and Michael Cross launched the Free Our Data campaign for open access to publicly-funded geodata in the UK with an article in The Guardian.
• March 31, 2006. The Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (Curtiba, Brazil, March 20-31, 2006) adopted a statement endorsing open access for biodiversity data.
• April 3, 2006. The European Commission released a report calling for an open-access mandate to publicly-funded research. The report is dated January 2006 but was apparently not released until April 3. The inquiry underlying the report was launched in June 2004. (See SOAN for 5/2/06.)
• April 3, 2006. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) announced that it is developing a policy of open access to CIHR-funded research. (See SOAN for 5/2/06.)
• April 10, 2006. Eprints added an email request button. DSpace added the feature the next day.
• April 11, 2006. Microsoft launched Live Academic Search.
• April 17, 2006. The pro-business Committee for Economic Development (CED) issued a report supporting the NIH policy, calling for it to be strengthened and extended to other federal funding agencies, and recommending open access for federally-funded research.
• April 17, 2006. Participants in a CODATA workshop (Pretoria, September 5-7, 2005) released a report urging Southern African institutions to mandate open-access archiving and promote data sharing.
• April 25, 2006. Ourmedia released the Open media statement of principles
• May 2006. The German Parliament began considering a bill (based on an article by Gerd Hansen) that would permit author self-archiving of journal articles six months after publication regardless of the terms in a copyright transfer agreement the author might have signed. (See SOAN for 6/2/06.)
• May 2, 2006. Senators John Cornyn and Joe Lieberman introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 in the U.S. Senate. The FRPAA would mandate open access to most federally funded research. (See SOAN for 5/2/06.)
• May 9, 2006. Humboldt University Berlin adopted an Open Access Declaration.
• May 11, 2006. Sweden launched a national open access initiative whose goal is "to promote maximum accessibility and visibility of works produced by researchers, teachers and students at Swedish universities and university colleges."
• May 15, 2006. India's National Institute of Technology (NIT) in Rourkela adopted an open-access mandate.
• May 23, 2006. The Finnish Council of University Rectors decided to support a wide-ranging set of initiatives to advance open access in Finland.
• May 23, 2006. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) signed the May 23 letter from the Association of American Publishers (AAP) opposing FRPAA, concerned that FRPAA would harm its publishing arm, AnthroSource. For its own part, the AnthroSource Steering Committee wrote a letter supporting FRPAA (August 9, 2006, made public October 7, 2006). In response, on October 30, 2006, the AAA disbanded the committee.
• May 24, 2006. Elsevier launched its Sponsored-Article hybrid journal model. (See SOAN for 6/2/06.)
• May 31, 2006. The Wall Street Journal published a Harris Poll showing that an overwhelming majority of Americans supported open access for publicly-funded research.
• June 6, 2006. Science Commons launched Scholar's Copyright, three "author addenda" for copyright transfer agreements to help authors retain the rights they need to provide open access to their work.
• June 21, 2006. The Royal Society launched its EXiS Open Choice hybrid journal model. (See SOAN for 7/2/06.)
• June 21, 2006. France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) adopted a policy asking its researchers to deposit their research articles in HAL, the central French open-access repository.
• June 22, 2006. CERN published a report outlining its project to convert all the toll-access journals in particle physics to open access. CERN began implementing the plan at a November 3, 2006, meeting. (See SOAN for 9/2/06 and SOAN for 12/2/06.)
• June 25, 2006. Participants in the iCommons iSummit for 2006 (Rio de Janeiro, June 23-25, 2006) released the Rio Declaration on Open Access.
• June 27, 2006. The University of North Carolina released its Journal Author Agreement to help authors retain the rights they needed to authorize open access.
• June 28, 2006. The Research Councils UK (RCUK) issued its long-awaited open-access policy. It lets the eight separate Research Councils go their own way, but on the day of the announcement, three had already decided to mandate open access to the research they fund. (See SOAN for 7/2/06.)
• June 29, 2006. SHERPA launched JULIET, a database of the open-access policies adopted by funding agencies.
• July 28, 2006. Twenty-five US university provosts signed a public letter endorsing FRPAA and calling for open access to publicly-funded research. This letter, organized by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, triggered a wave of similar letters: a July 31, 2006, letter organized by Greater Western Library Alliance, a September 5, 2006 letter organized by the Oberlin Group, and a September 6, 2006, letter organized by the New England Council of Presidents. SPARC then consolidated the signatures and provided a web form for US-based provosts and presidents to add new ones.
• August 3, 2006. BMJ launched the BMJ Unlocked hybrid journal program.
• August 4, 2006. The Science Navigation Group (parent company to BioMed Central) launched Chemistry Central, its first project beyond biomedicine. At the same time it announced plans for PhysMath Central. A new umbrella organization, Open Access Central, will coordinate the growing family of disciplinary projects.
• August 8, 2006. John Wiley & Sons launched its Funded Access hybrid journal program.
• August 9, 2006. The University of Tasmania School of Computing adopted an open access mandate for both faculty and graduate students.
• August 12, 2006. Cambridge University Press launched the Cambridge Open Option hybrid journal program.
• August 14, 2006. The American Chemical Society launched its AuthorChoice hybrid journal program.
• August 16, 2006. The American Physical Society launched its Free To Read hybrid journal program.
• August 20, 2006. The US National Endowment for the Humanities adopted guidelines giving preference to projects that promise free online access to the results. (See SOAN for 10/2/06.)
• August 28, 2006. Stockholm University adopted the policy that faculty shall, as far as possible, deposit their research articles in the institutional repository.
• August 30, 2006. OhioLink released its Author Addendum (approved May 2006) to help authors retain the rights they need to authorize open access.
• September 2006. Four German universities launched the Informationsplattform Open Access.
• September 1, 2006. The Institute of Physics, publisher of 73 physics journals, launched EprintWeb.org, a new mirror, front end, and enhancement to arXiv.
• September 7, 2006. Participants in the Second Gulf-Maghreb Scientific Congress (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, February 25-26, 2006) issued the Declaration of Riyadh for Free Access to Scientific and Technical Information in Arabic and French. An English translation came out on October 12, 2006.
• September 11, 2006. The European Commission and nine European research institutions launched DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research), a large-scale, international knowledge infrastructure built on open-access repositories.
• September 23, 2006. Digital Universe launched the open-access Encyclopedia of Earth.
• September 25, 2006. The American Society of Plant Biologists adopted a hybrid journal program.
• September 28, 2006. Taylor & Francis launched its iOpenAccess hybrid journal program.
• October 2006. The Australian government published a report on Research Quality Framework recommending open access to publicly-funded research.
• October 2006. The newly updated UK Model NESLi2 Licence for Journals contains a provision (3.1.3.13) to allow open-access archiving.
• October 1, 2006. Open access mandates took effect at four of the eight Research Councils UK (RCUK): the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSCR), Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC), Medical Research Council (MRC), and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). The first three were adopted in June 2006 and the fourth in August. Also on October 1, an open-access request or encouragement (short of a mandate) took effect at a fifth Research Council, the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC).
• October 1, 2006. The year-old OA policy at the Wellcome Trust was extended to all outstanding grants, no longer how long ago they were awarded.
• October 2, 2006. The Commission to the European Parliament published report recommending open access to publicly-funded EU geodata.
• October 3, 2006. The Royal Society of Chemistry launched its Open Science hybrid journal program.
• October 6, 2006. Austria's Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF, Fund for the Promotion of Scientific Research) adopted an open access policy asking its grantees to provide open access to FWF-funded research.
• October 10, 2006. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) released a draft policy that would mandate open access to CIHR-funded research.
• October 11, 2006. A group of important French research institutions (CEMAGREF, CIRAD, CNRS, INRA, INRIA, INSERM, IRD, and the Pasteur Institute) agreed to use HAL (Hyper Article on Line) for their open-access archiving. Some already required open-access archiving for their research output (INRA) and some strongly recommended it (CNRS, INRIA, INSERM).
• October 12, 2006. Chemists Without Borders adopted an Open Chemistry Position Statement.
• October 17, 2007. Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia) launched Citizendium, a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia using author attribution and expert peer review.
• October 23, 2006. China announced a mandate for open data.
• October 25, 2006. JISC and SURF drafted a model license to help authors retain the rights they need for open-access archiving.
• October 27, 2006. Participants in a Mexico City conference issued The Declaration of Mexico, recommending open access policies to Latin American universities and governments.
• October 30, 2006. Yale University and the UN Environment Programme officially launched Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE).
• November 2006. The Karman Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Bern committed itself to open access for all its future projects.
• November 2006. The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) revised its Internet Rights Charter, which now (in section 3.3) construes open access to publicly-funded research as a consequence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The first edition of the charter was developed in 2001-2002.
• November 2006. Canada's Athabasca University adopted a policy asking its faculty to self-archive their peer-reviewed research articles
• November 2006. Twenty-two US federal government agencies formed an Interagency Working Group on Digital Data (IWGDD) and plan to deposit the data generated by their research grantees in a network of OA repositories. They are considering an OA mandate.
• November 1, 2006. The eight titles in the European Physical Journal family adopted a hybrid journal model.
• November 2, 2006. The Australian Government Productivity Commission released a report recommending open access to publicly-funded research.
• November 20, 2006. Horizons Unlimited (Bologna, Italy) launched OpenArchives.eu, a major new directory of open-access repositories.
• November 21, 2006. The European Parliament reached a compromise on the INSPIRE Directive (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe). Geospatial data "designed for the general public" will "generally" be open access although government agencies may charge cost-recovery fees "for access to data that has to be updated frequently, such as weather reports". The directive takes effect in the summer of 2007.
• November 22, 2006. Participants in a Bangalore conference (November 2-3, 2006) drafted a model National Open Access Policy for Developing Countries.
• November 28, 2006. The Council of the Rectors of Portuguese Universities released a declaration on open access it had approved about two weeks earlier.
• December 2006. The Scientific Council of the European Research Council (ERC) issued a Statement on Open Access in which it pledged to adopt an OA mandate for ERC-funded research "as soon as pertinent repositories become operational".
• December 2006. Word surfaced of Google's program to digitize the back runs of journals for free online access. (This program probably began earlier but was not publicly revealed until August 2007.)
• December 1, 2006. The open-access mandate at the UK's Particle Physics & Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) took effect. The policy was adopted on October 19, 2006.
• December 1, 2006. IFLA and UNESCO released the IFLA/UNESCO Internet Manifesto Guidelines (dated September 2006), recommending open access as one way to implement the 2002 IFLA Internet Manifesto (see August 2002 above).
• December 3, 2006. The Australian Research Council (ARC) Funding Rules for 2008 ask grantees (in Rule 1.4.5.3) to deposit their ARC-funded work in an OA repository or explain why not.
• December 4, 2006. The School of Information Systems Computing and Mathematics at Brunel University adopted an open-access mandate for journal articles and dissertations.
• December 7, 2006. The Working Group on Libraries for India's National Knowledge Commission (NKC) recommended an OA mandate for publicly-funded research.
• December 8, 2006. The UK Office of Fair Trading concluded that the lack of OA to public data costs the country Ł500 million/year.
• December 9, 2006. Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council adopted a policy to encourage OA for NHMRC-funded research, and said it will soon ask non-complying grantees to justify their non-compliance.
• December 12, 2006. Bharathidasan University adopted an OA mandate for peer-reviewed journal articles by its faculty.
• December 13, 2006. A report from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences (CCHSS) recommended an OA mandate, especially for publicly-funded research, and university support for OA and FRPAA.
• December 14, 2006. The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) launched the EMBO Open hybrid journal program.
• December 14, 2006. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) issued Principles And Guidelines For Access To Research Data From Public Funding to implement its Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding (January 2004).
• December 18, 2006. Australia's Department of Education, Science and Training allocated $25.5 million to build OA repositories at Australian universities as part of the country's new Research Quality Framework (RQF).
• December 21, 2006. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) officially launched PLoS ONE.

• 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 position statement on public access to scientific literature, calling for OA to publicly funded research within six months of its publication.
• January 31, 2007. The European Research Council revealed, in its grant application guidelines, that it will pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals.
• February 2007. AlouetteCanada, the digitization and OA project for Canadian cultural heritage, issued a Declaration that includes language supporting OA.
• February 2007. India's National Centre for Science Information launched CASSIR (Cross Archive Search Services for Indian Repositories). At the time of launch, CASSIR indexed 15 of India's OA, OAI-compliant repositories and was working to index the rest.
• February 8, 2007. The e-Infrastructure Working Group of the UK Office of Science and Innovation (OSI) issued a report endorsing the RCUK's OA mandate. (OSI is a branch of the UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), which opposed an OA mandate for the UK.)
• February 12, 2007. The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) released a draft Provosts' Statement On Publishing Agreements. It includes an author addendum enabling scholars to retain the rights they need to authorize postprint archiving.
• February 13, 2007. A group of publishers and publisher associations released the anti-OA Brussels Declaration on STM Publishing.
• February 13, 2007. The Directory of Open Access Journals launched a membership program.
• February 14, 2007. A group of writers released version 1.0 of its Definition of Free Cultural Works.
• February 15, 2007. FreeCulture.org and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access declared February 15, 2007, to be a National Day of Action for Open Access and FRPAA.
• February 15, 2007. OA proponents delivered a petition with over 20,000 signatures to Janez Potocnik, EU Commissioner for Science and Research. The petition called for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research in Europe.
• February 15, 2007. Students at Harvard College Free Culture launched an OA Thesis Repository for undergraduate senior theses.
• February 16, 2007. The European Commission (EC) released its long-awaited, non-binding Communication on access to scientific information in the digital age along with a Staff Working Paper and FAQ. These docucments form the EC response to an earlier EC-commissioned recommendation for an OA mandate (dated January 2006, released April 2006).
• February 21, 2007. Hindawi Publishing converted the last of its subscription-based journals to OA and became an OA-only publisher.
• February 23, 2007. The University of Bremen released its Science Plan 2010, which endorsed the goal of providing open access and creating the infrastructure needed for it.
• February 24, 2007. Ronald Plasterk, one of the best-known OA proponents in the Netherlands, was appointed the country's minister of education, culture, and science.
• February 24, 2007. Creative Commons launched the 3.0 versions of its licenses.
• February 27, 2007. The ATLAS Experiment at CERN released a Statement on Open Access Publishing encouraging its 1,800 participating scientists to publish their results in OA journals. (CERN scientists were already operating under an OA archiving mandate.) Three other CERN experiments soon adopted the same statement: the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment (March 2, 2007), A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE), and Total Cross Section, Elastic Scattering and Diffraction Dissociation at the LHC (TOTEM) (both the latter c. March 20, 2007).
• February 27, 2007. The American Association of University Presses (AAUP) released a Statement on Open Access. It expresses some skepticism about fee-based OA journals and a willingness to explore mixed business models and OA monographs.
• February 28, 2007. The Research Information Network (RIN) published a document, Research and the Scholarly Communications Process: Towards Strategic Goals for Public Policy: A Statement of Principles, which has been signed by an unusual combination of friends and foes of OA.
• March 2007. ChemXSeer launched, an OA database and search engine for chemical literature, formulae, tables, and data. One of the co-developers was C. Lee Giles, who was also one of the co-developers of CiteSeer.
• March 1, 2007. SURF announced that all the universities in the Netherlands had now signed the Berlin Declaration.
• March 8, 2007. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and Elsevier agreed that when HHMI-funded authors publish in Elsevier journals, HHMI will pay Elsevier between $1,000 and $1,500 per article to deposit the peer-reviewed but unedited manuscripts in PubMed Central six months after publication. (Also see SOAN for April 2007.)
• March 9, 2007. CERN released its plan to convert all the subscription journals in particle physics to OA.
• March 12, 2007. Polimetrica released an Open Access Manifesto, apparently the first from a book publisher.
• March 14, 2007. The Université de Ličge adopted an OA mandate.
• March 16, 2007. MIT canceled access to the digital library of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) when the SAE refused to lift its onerous DRM.
• March 19, 2007. Elias Zerhouni, Director of the NIH, told a Senate committee that the NIH public access policy should be strengthened from a request to a requirement.
• March 20, 2007. Nature Biotech announced a new policy, "recommending that raw data from proteomics and molecular-interaction experiments be deposited in a public [OA] database before manuscript submission."
• March 27, 2007. The university press (Universitätsverlag Ilmenau) of the Ilmenau Technical University (Technische Universität Ilmenau) began publishing each of its books in dual editions, one OA and one priced/printed.
• March 27, 2007. The Australian government Productivity Commission released a report proposing an 'author pays' OA journal mandate. (See my blog comments.)
• March 31, 2007. The Task Force on Electronic Publication for the American Philological Association (APA) and the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) endorsed OA archiving and OA publication of previously microfiched works.
• April 2007. JISC adopted an OA mandate for JISC-funded research in the April 2007 version of its grant guidelines.
• April 2007. Open Access Law Canada started its work to help bring OA to Canadian legal research.
• April 2007. The American Geophysical Union launched a hybrid OA program for most of its 19 journals.
• April 2007. The Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) launched Online Research Collections Australia (ORCA), a registry and support network for OA repositories in Australia.
• April 2007. The Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance (CBCRA) decided to encourage rather than require OA for CBCRA-funded research.
• April 1, 2007. Two Research Councils of the UK merged, one requiring OA (PPARC) and one merely encouraging it (CCLRC). The new merged entity, Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), will require OA.
• April 2, 2007. We learned that France's Institut national de recherche en informatique ete en automatique (INRIA) deposited its entire research output in HAL, the centralized French OA repository.
• April 4, 2007. Canada's Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) launched a funding program to support OA journals.
• April 4, 2007. JISC and the University of Glasgow launched OpenLOCKSS, a new program to use LOCKSS for preserving OA journals.
• April 6, 2007. The chief Flemish research agency, Research Foundation - Flanders (Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek - Vlaanderen, or FWO), adopted an OA mandate for FWO-funded research.
• April 10, 2007. The European Commission adopted an FP7 Grant Agreement which requires grantees to submit electronic copies of their journal articles to the EC and permits the EC to redistribute them online.
• April 13, 2007. EDINA, JISC, and SHERPA launched the Depot, a universal OA repository for UK researchers.
• April 13, 2007. BioMed Central announced the first three OA journals from its offshoot, PhysMath Central.
• April 13, 2007. The EU's eContentPlus program issued its 2007 Work Programme, which endorsed OA and called for funding proposals in areas that include OA.
• April 18, 2007. Bentham Science announced plans to launch 300 OA journals before the end of 2007.
• April 18, 2007. Turkey's Middle East Technical University adopted an OA mandate.
• April 18, 2007. Bentham Science Publishers announced plans to launch 300 OA journals before the end of 2007.
• May 2007. The UK Medical Research Council and British Heart Foundation, which both already had OA mandates, joined with a of (unnamed) pharmaceutical and analytical science companies to set up a Ł17 million fund for research into biomarkers. The fund will operate under an OA mandate.
• May 2007. The Norwegian Open Research Archive (NORA) and the Norwegian Digital Library launched OpenAccess.no, a central location for OA information and advocacy in Norway.
• May 2, 2007. The Central Economics and Mathematics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences adopted an OA mandate.
• May 2, 2007. A consortium of German universities officially launched the Informationsplattform Open Access, a nationwide platform for information on OA in Germany (online since September 2006).
• May 3, 2007. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Energy (DOE) both called for OA to publicly-funded research.
• May 3, 2007. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign adopted the Author Addendum drafted by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC).
• May 3, 2007. The University of Minnesota adopted the Author Addendum drafted by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC).
• May 7, 2007. The University of Wisconsin at Madison adopted the Author Addendum drafted by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC).
• May 11, 2007. We learned that Pakistan is creating a portal that will provide OA to all journals published in the country.
• May 16, 2007. The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe recommended "wide public access to research results to which no copyright restrictions apply" (i.e. data).
• May 17, 2007. SPARC and Science Commons announced a consolidation and enhancement of their author addenda.
• May 23, 2007. The German non-profit Netzwerk Freies Wissen (NFW) released sign-on declaration, For better development and just access to knowledge in all forms. The release date was chosen to coincicde with the first day of the G8 ministers meeting in Munich.
• May 23, 2007. A bill was introduced in the Brazilian Parliament to mandate that public universities mandate OA to their research output. At the samem time, Brazilian OA advocates began circulating a petition to support the bill.
• May 25, 2007. Spain's Ministry of Culture began funding OA repositories throughout the country.
• June 2007. The UK Medical Research Council added a data access policy to its larger open access policy.
• June 2007. Spain's Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (or Spanish National Research Council, CSIC) converted 12 of its 32 journals to OA and plans to convert the rest.
• June 2007. Sweden's OpenAccess.se launched a project to improve the infrastructure for the nation's research output and at the same time to increase the OA portion of that output.
• June 2007. The Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC) decided to encourage rather than require OA for RGC-funded research.
• June 6, 2007. The University of Nottingham set up an OA publishing fund.
• June 7, 2007. Nature launched three free online resources at once: Nature Reports Climate Change, Nature Reports Stem Cells, and Nature Precedings. The last is a preprint exchange for biology, medicine, chemistry, and geoscience, using CC licenses, DOIs, RSS feeds, and Web 2.0 features like user tags, ratings, and discussions.
• June 12, 2007. Nature launched Scintilla, an OA news aggregator for RSS and Atom feeds. It supports user ratings, recommendations, and interest groups.
• June 21, 2007. Springer and the Dutch library consortium UKB (Universiteitsbibliotheken en de Koninklijke Bibliotheek) announced a joint OA initiative. Springer's OA hybrid journals will waive their publication fees for authors from UKB institutions, and these OA articles may appear immediately in the institutional repositories of UKB institutions.
• June 22, 2007. The US Department of Energy launched WorldWideScience.org (previously called Science.World), an OA portal and federated search engine for scientific research in 15 countries.
• June 26, 2007. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) announced its long-anticipated OA mandate for research publications by HHMI employees.
• June 26, 2007. The German government started using public money to fund scientific articles for the German Wikipedia.
• June 27, 2007. Lisbet Rugtvedt, Norway's State Secretary for the Ministry of Education and Research, publicly endorsed OA.
• June 28, 2007. Lund University launched Journal Info, an online tool to help scholars evaluate journals where they might submit their work. It covers OA and non-OA journals, and for non-OA journals recommends some OA alternatives and indicates the journal's self-archiving policy, subscription price per article, and subscription price per citation.
• June 29, 2007. The Canadian Library Association announced plans to convert most of its publications to OA and encourage its members to self-archive.
• June 29, 2007. The American Physiological Society (APS) adopted a hybrid OA journal program (Author Choice) for 10 of its journals.
• July 2007. The Audiovisual Communications Laboratory at Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) adopted an OA policy for its publications and data in order to facilitate the reproducibility of its results.
• July 3, 2007. Google relaxed a restriction on some of its digitized public-domain books, offering plain-text editions alongside the scanned images. Plain-text editions support cutting and pasting and adaptive technologies for visually impaired users.
• July 10, 2007. The Nereus consortium of European academic libraries announced the September launch an OA economics research portal called NEEO (Network of European Economists Online).
• July 17, 2007. The Open Library, from the Open Content Alliance, launched a working demo and described its plans for a wiki-like universal catalog.
• July 19, 2007. Professional Engineering Publishing (PEP) launched a hybrid OA program for all 19 of its journals.
• July 26, 2007. Oxford University Press (OUP) reduced the subscription prices on 28 of its hybrid ("Oxford Open") journals to reflect rising levels of author uptake --for the second year in a row.
• July 30, 2007. The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) launched a hybrid OA policy for its journal, Learned Publishing.
• August 2007. Google's program to share data with researchers includes a rule requiring OA for the research results.
• August 2007. The National Science Foundation, Public Library of Science, and the San Diego Supercomputing Center launched SciVee ("YouTube for scientists"), which broadcasts OA videos explaining OA articles.
• August 2007. The Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering & Technology (IRCSET) issued a strong draft OA mandate and called for public comments.
• August 2, 2007. UNESCO released the final version of the Kronberg Declaration on the Future of Knowledge Acquisition and Sharing. (It released a draft in July 2007.)
• August 8, 2007. Germany's DINI (Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation) launched OA-Netzwerk to share best practices and improve the data quality of the national network of OA repositories.
• August 11, 2007. The University of Wisconsin at Madison launched a Library Fund for Open Access Publishing.
• August 12, 2007. The German Research Society (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft or DFG) announced a funding program to launch new science journals, expand existing journals, and help print journals make the transition to electronic publication. To be eligible for funding, journals must meet the DFG guidelines for open access.
• August 20, 2007. Athabasca University launched the OA-focused Athabasca University Press.
• August 21, 2007. Blake Stacey launched Eureka Science Journal Watch, a wiki to track science journals and their progress toward OA. Eureka is a more general version of its predecessor, MathSciJournalWiki.
• August 23, 2007. The Association of American Publishers (AAP) Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) division launched PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine) to lobby against government OA policies.
• August 23, 2007. Columbia Law School and the University of Colorado Law School launched AltLaw.org, an OA portal of US case law.
• September 2007. India's National Knowledge Commission (NKC) released a report recommending an OA mandate for publicly-funded research, public funding for OA digitization projects, and a funding model to support OA journals. (The release date of the report is not clear.)
• September 1, 2007. The OA mandate at the Swiss National Science Foundation took effect.
• September 4, 2007. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) announced an OA mandate for CIHR-funded research.
• September 6, 2007. The UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) announced an OA mandate for AHRC-funded research.
• September 8, 2007. Elsevier launched OncologySTAT, a portal offering free online access to 101 of its oncology journals.
• September 10, 2007. The CNRS' Institut de physique nucléaire et de physique des particules (IN2P3) agreed to pay the publication fees for French physicists who publish OA articles in the Journal of High Energy Physics.
• September 10, 2007. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) converted its large database of ITU standards to OA.
• September 20, 2007. The Boston Library Consortium of 19 libraries joined the Open Content Alliance. It preferred the OCA to the Google Library project because the OCA provided full OA to the digitized files.
• September 24, 2007. The Open Knowledge Foundation released a draft open data license for public comment.
• September 26, 2007. The Harvard University Faculty Council approved a plan to make OA archiving the default for all research articles produced by faculty. The plan still has to be approved by the faculty. (On October 16, Stuart Shieber introduced the motion to the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.)
• September 26, 2007. The final report from an NSF-JISC workshop strongly endorsed an OA mandate for publicly-funded research.
• September 27, 2007. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) agreed to pay the publishing fees when HHMI-funded researchers publish in Springer's hybrid OA journals.
• September 28, 2007. WIPO adopted 45 reform proposals that will modify the organization's mission and advance access to knowledge.
• October 2007. MIT geophysicist Brian Evans drafted a resolution for the MIT Faculty Committee on the Library System calling on MIT faculty to provide OA to their own work, especially when it is based on public funding.
• October 2007. Elsevier released the license it will use when it deposits articles in PubMed Central (PMC) or UKPMC on behalf of funding agencies who pay it to do so. It's notable for permitting a range of re-use rights as well as free online access.
• October 2007. The Australian government proposed an Australian National Data Service (ANDS) to promote OA, preservation, and re-use of publicly-funded research data.
• October 1, 2007. The NIH launched SHARe (SNP Health Association Resource), "one of the most extensive collections of genetic and clinical data ever made freely available to researchers worldwide."
• October 4, 2007. The University of Göttingen and Springer agreed all articles by Göttingen faculty published in Springer journals will be OA under the Springer Open Choice program.
• October 8, 2007. The UKPMC Publishers Panel, composed of publishers and research funders, agreed that when funders pay publishers to make an article OA, then the publishers should remove key permission barriers as well as price barriers.
• October 10, 2007. Sweden joined a Nordic project funded by Nordbib to launch new OA journals and convert existing TA journals to OA.
• October 17, 2007. Six Brazilian university rectors met at the University of Brasilia to launch a campaign across Brazil and other Portuguese-speaking countries to persuade research institutions to adopt strong, local OA policies.
• October 17, 2007. Jon Ippolito and Craig Dietrich released ThoughtMesh, an OA distribution system optimized for tag-based discovery.
• October 18, 2007. Fourteen European university rectors met at the University of Liege to launch EurOpenScholarship, a campaign to persuade European research institutions to adopt strong, local OA policies.
• October 19, 2007. The Social Science Research Network officially launched the Humanities Research Network, a collection of OA repositories in different fields of the humanities.
• October 19, 2007. Library and Archives Canada released its new digital information strategy for public comments. The draft (Section 3.3) calls for open access to publicly-funded research.
• October 20, 2007. The Open Content Alliance announced its plan to digitize and lend orphan works, its first foray beyond public-domain books.
• October 29, 2007. The Université Libre de Bruxelles announced its program to publish OA editions of its out-of-print books.
• October 31, 2007. WorldSciNet launched WorldSciNet Open Access, a hybrid OA journal program that applies to all 133 journals published by WorldScientific and all eight journals published by Imperial College Press.
• November 2007. Italy's Conference of University Rectors (Conferenza dei Rettori delle Universitŕ Italiane) adopted guidelines for the deposit of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in institutional repositories, which it regards as the first step in a plan to make Italian ETDs OA.
• November 2007. Norway adopted a policy requiring government agencies to provide OA to any geodata they gather or produce.
• November 2007. The New Zealand government and National Library of New Zealand launched the Kiwi Research Information Service (KRIS), which will harvest New Zealand's institutional repositories.
• November 5, 2007. The Swedish Research Council announced plans for a Swedish National Data Service (SND), an OA harvester of the country's databases in the social sciences, epidemiology, and the humanities. It will be hosted at Gothenburg University.
• November 8, 2007. JISC and UKOLN launched SWORD 1.0 (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit).
• November 10, 2007. The World Health Organization (WHO) Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (IGWG) was considering an OA mandate until November, when it issued a new draft merely encouraging, not requiring, OA.
• November 14, 2007. France's National Agency for Research (Agence nationale de la recherche, or ANR) adopted an OA mandate for ANR-funded research.
• November 16, 2007. SPARC Europe and the DOAJ announced a project to develop standards for OA journals and provide help to publishers in meeting those standards.
• November 20, 2007. Sage and Hindawi struck a deal to launch a new line of full OA journals, marking Sage's first foray into gold OA.
• November 23, 2007. The Council of the European Union released a set of Conclusions on access to research. The document "underlines...the importance" of OA to publicly-funded research, but stopped short of recommending a policy to insure it.
• November 29, 2007. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration made a "soft launch" in order to collect signatures before its official launch in mid-January 2008.
• November 29, 2007. The University of Pittsburgh Press announced that it was working with the University Library System to provide OA to all 500 books on the press' backlist. For new books, it will start with a non-OA edition and add an OA edition after two years.
• December 2007. The Flanders Marine Institute (Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee, or VLIZ) adopted a policy to deposit the Institute's research output in its OA repository, the Open Marine Archive (Open Marien Archief, or OMA).
• December 2007. A research group from the University of Granada launched SCImago, an OA database of journal data organized by field and country.
• December 6, 2008. The journals from the Nature Publishing Group will provide OA, and use CC-NC licenses, for all papers reporting full genome sequences.
• December 8, 2008. Six European university and museum presses launched Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN), a consortium dedicated to publishing OA monographs with print-on-demand (POD) editions.
• December 13, 2008. Google launched its Knol project. A knol ("unit of knowledge") is an OA article with attribution, on any subject, with support for user comments and additions, no editorial supervision from Google, and an option for the author to earn ad revenue.
• December 16, 2007. Science Commons released its protocol for implementing open access data.
• December 26, 2008. Congress passed, and the President signed, a spending bill mandating OA to research funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

On my page of lists I have two historical lists to supplement this timeline. See the list of journal declarations of independence and the list of university actions against high journal prices.

Return to the Newsletter

Return to the Blog

This timeline has been translated into Japanese. Other translations are welcome.

Wade Garrison has made an interactive version of this timeline.

Peter Suber
Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College
Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge
Senior Researcher, SPARC
peters@earlham.edu