By Colin Macilwain - Open-access publishing has always been a field in which the words are prone to race ahead of the facts. For more than a decade, advocates and some funding agencies have been proselytizing for open access, frequently pledging that all of their work is going to be rendered open to all.
In 2012, we heard that the Research Councils UK (RCUK) would pursue a new, comprehensive, open-access policy. On 17 July, the European Union said that it would pursue a policy whereby 100 percent of research funded by its Horizon 2020 research program would be open access. In September, the Australian Research Council said that it was going open access. Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other elite institutions have mandates requiring their academics to publish openly on their universities’ own repositories. The World Bank put all of its research out for free use on 1 July. At this rate, it is only a matter of time before the United Nations declares an open-access policy for research published from outer space.
