Publishers have fought back, most recently in the U.S. with the 2011 Research Works Act, which sought to overturn the NIH open-access policy. The bill was withdrawn by its sponsors, Darrell Issa (R–Calif.) and Carolyn Maloney (D–N.Y.), after protests from scholars and scientists who threatened to boycott Elsevier, one of the bill’s leading proponents. In the U.K. there are concerns that the government's latest proposals favoring gold open access will divert money from university research budgets to journal publishers. If authors have to pay article processing or other fees to support the journals, those funds will come out of grant money. Currently, journal subscriptions are paid out of library and university budgets.

But the movement continues to grow, fueled by the need to grant access to the scientific literature to researchers in developing countries as well as to enable the growing trend of publishing material such as negative results that don't fit the space limitations and editorial agendas of traditional journals. It is fed, too, by stories like that of 15-year-old Maryland high school student Jack Andraka, whose access helped him invent a diagnostic test for pancreatic cancer that beats existing tests for cost, accuracy and speed by wide margins.

"The point of open access," Suber says, "is access for everybody who can make use of the information."

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