A Changing Landscape

Since the launch of ChemistryOpen in 2011, more and more governments are mandating publicly funded research results to be made available in an open-access form; the main idea being that scientific research should be available to the public free of charge to allow creative and innovative research. The Research Councils UK (RCUK) mandated that from April 1st, 2013 all publications resulting from RCUK-funded research should be made open access. As a result, over 20 UK-based universities have opened a Wiley Open Access account thereby ensuring the funding for their open-access articles published with Wiley and Wiley-VCH. In the US, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) bill, which would require funding agencies to make articles reporting on publicly funded research results freely available, is under ongoing discussion. The EU research and innovation program, Horizon 2020, and governments and agencies in Germany, the Netherlands, France and Belgium, are issuing similar open-access mandates.