1. Highlights from the Open Access Timeline (1) 1971, Project Gutenberg launched on the Internet (originally as an FTP site). There are now 18,000 free books online there and 2 million ebooks downloaded each month. Post-WWW: 1997, when both Research Papers in Economics (RePEc), a database of economics working papers, journal articles and software components, and PubMed were launched (which includes free access to Medline). 1998, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) was launched by ARL, and later SPARC-Europe was formed. 1999, The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was launched. From Peter Suber, Open Access Timeline. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm

2. Highlights from the Open Access Timeline (2) 2000, PubMed Central launched to supplement PubMed’s citations and abstracts with free full-text articles. 2001, The Australian National University launched its E- Print Repository, the first OAI-compliant institutional archive. 2001, the Budapest Open Access Initiative arose from a meeting convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet. Currently there are 4422 signatories by individuals and organizations.

3. Highlights from the Open Access Timeline (3) 2003, The Public Library of Science launched its first open-access journal, PLoS Biology. 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. 2003. The UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee launched an inquiry into the prices and accessibility of scientific journals, including the question of whether the government should support open-access journals. The report in 2004 recommended that public funding agencies require open access to publicly-funded research through deposit in the authors' institutional repositories. 2003, The UN World Summit on the Information Society approved a Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action containing endorsements of open access to scientific information.

4. Highlights from the Open Access Timeline (4) 2004, The National Library of Canada started providing open access to doctoral dissertations on deposit at Theses Canada. 2004, Elsevier, the world's largest publisher of medical and scientific literature 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. 2004, the 34 country signatories to the OECD issued the Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding. 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.

5. Highlights from the Open Access Timeline (5) 2005, The US National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy which was announced for public comment in 2004 went into effect. 2005, The Wellcome Trust started implementing its new open-access mandate for Wellcome- funded research. 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 to publicly funded research.

6. European Commission Report recommendations, 2006 Guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research, at the time of publication and also long-term A “level-playing field” so that different business models in publishing can compete fairly in the market Ranking scientific journals by quality, defined more widely than pure scientific excellence, but also taking into account factors such as management of copyright, search facilities and archiving Developing pricing strategies that promote competition in the journal market Scrutinising major mergers that may take place in this sector in the future Promoting the development of electronic publication, for example by eliminating unfavourable tax treatment of electronic publications and encouraging public funding and public-private partnerships to create digital archives in areas with little commercial investment. http://europa.eu.int/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/06/414&format =HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en