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In the last year we have seen several positive global developments which have established open access as an important trend in the evolvement of scholarly communication. These can be seen at both ...

In the last year we have seen several positive global developments which have established open access as an important trend in the evolvement of scholarly communication. These can be seen at both governmental and funding level with several major funding agencies, RCUK (UK), OTKA (Hungary), NIH (USA), Swedish Research Council (Sweden), Wellcome (UK), having introduced mandatory policies requiring funded research to be deposited in an open access archive and encouraging publication of research results in open access journals.

The traditional business model for scientific publishers relies on restricting access to published research, in order to recoup the costs of the publication process. This restriction of access to published research prevents full use being made of digital technologies, and is contrary to the interests of authors, funders and the academic community as a whole. The traditional subscription-based model is also becoming increasingly unsustainable, as growing amounts of research is being published whilst library budgets remain static.

Open access journals, in which the costs associated with publication are generally covered by publication fees instead of subscription revenue, have grown rapidly in recent years. This increase is also evident in the institutional repository environment, whereby organizations are acknowledging the importance of institutional support for open access by implementing institutional repositories. The continuing growth of open access publishing depends heavily on how institutions manage their scholarly communication. Given this reality, it has become clear how important the role of the institution is in adjusting themselves and responding in a timely manner to the introduction of these policies.

This presentation continues with the analysis of some of those institutional responses as a consequence of these changes, in terms of policy procedures and ways to support open access, by presenting some case studies written by institutions for both the ‘green route’ and ‘gold route’ to open access that aim to illustrate the innovations and efforts carried out by them in this regard. This will include demonstrations of institutions’ existing repositories.

BioMed Central is an open access STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher which has pioneered the open access publishing model. All research articles published by BioMed Central are archived without delay in PubMed Central and several other international archives. BioMed Central also allows authors to immediately deposit the official, final version of their published article in any suitable digital repository.