In recent months, we’ve been following the progress of Open Access, as it creeps along in this decade-long process of developing from an experimental initiative at a couple of campuses—most notably, MIT—into a veritable movement.

The momentum of the growing movement is demonstrated by organizations like Right to Research, a coalition of student associations representing more than 5.5 million members worldwide. Its glossy new website makes it easy for students, professors, and librarians to get involved and voice their support for Open Access. The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), shares a similar commitment to outreach, and its popular Sparky Awards, which showcase student videos that call for Open Access, are now in their fourth year.

Three recent news items also bode well for the future of Open Access and underscore its widespread support. First: On January 20, the U.S. Department of Labor, in coordination with the U.S. Education Department, issued guidelines for a $2-billion grant program aimed to help community colleges create, expand, or restructure career-training programs. The program is actively encouraging the development of course materials and learning environments openly available online. In an email to The Chronicle, U.S. Education Secretary Anne Duncan writes: “With $500-million available this year, this is easily one of the largest federal investments in open educational resources in history.”

Next: On January 12, MIT added a new section to its pioneering OpenCourseWare program: OCW Scholar, supported by a $2-million grant from the Stanton Foundation. The new initiative is specifically aimed to help “self-learners”—or perhaps community learners like those at P2PU—benefit from the course materials available online.

A third news item relates not to Open Access course materials, but to scholarly publications. A report published by Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP), an international team funded by the European Commission, traces the path from widespread support of Open Access to surprisingly scarce Open Access publications--SOAP claims that the number articles published in Open Access journals in 2009 represented only 8-10% of the estimated yearly global scientific output.

According to the SOAP report, almost 90% of more than 40,000 scholars across the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences surveyed believe that Open Access journals are good for both the research community and the individual researcher. In a Chronicle post dedicated to the study, Josh Fischman notes that support for Open Access is highest amongst scholars in the humanities, with more than 90% responding favorably. Despite this widespread support, 29% of the scholars surveyed said they had not published an Open Access journal. The two most popular reasons given were the high publishing fees, followed by the perception that Open Access journals are not of good quality.

While it may take some time for Open Access journals to achieve the prestige of their established print counterparts, or for established print journals to develop sustainable plans to make their content freely available online, there are other ways to ensure the free online distribution of scholarly research: institutional programs, like the Open Access resolution recently adopted by Oberlin College, which ask scholars not to publish only in Open Access journals, but rather to assist in the creation of an institutional digital repository of work by affiliated scholars.