The Open Access movement is on an upwards trajectory, with more and more research being made freely available each year. And yet the pace of change has been slower than many proponents of open access had hoped for. In an interview for Library Journal, Dr Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication, discusses the reasons for this and offers advice on how to accelerate adoption of open access.

Suber notes that there are many arguments in favour of open access. For authors in search of citations and impact, evidence that open access publications are cited more frequently may be an argument for selecting this publication route. For other groups, it might be the ethical arguments for open access.

Finally, Suber stresses the importance of individual actions: ‘It’s very easy for individual authors to make their own work open access, either through a journal or repository, and if they did that systematically, the larger problems would disappear.’