Finally open access - a new approach for a large-scale transition

For more than ten years, researchers have pushed for open access initiatives. While the amount of freely available scientific papers on the internet is growing continuously, no joint strategy is on the horizon yet to achieve a large-scale shift in the near future. In 2015, the Max Planck Digital Library published a much-noticed study showing that a large-scale transformation to open access publishing is possible without added expense. Based on this analysis an international initiative has been launched in December 2015 with a view to pursuing the open access transformation on a global level.