Open Access is a worldwide movement and supported by countless organisations and initiatives.

SPARC

SPARC, Scholarly Publishing and Adademic Resources Coalition, is an alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations. The coalition was an initiative of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) started in 1997 to be a constructive response to market dysfunctions in the scholarly communication system.

SPARC Europe is an alliance of European research libraries, library organizations, and research institutions. They advocate change in the scholarly communications market, support competition, and encourage new publishing models (in particular, open access models) that better serve the international researcher community.

SPARC
SPARC Europe

JISC

JISC, Joint Information Systems Commitee, works with further and higher education by providing strategic guidance, advice and opportunities to use information- and computer technologies to support teaching, learning, research and administration.

JISC

Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformationen DINI (German Initiative for Network Information)

The development of modern information and computer technologies calls for a change in the way universities and other research centers handle and disseminate information. Dealing with this change is a central topic for German universities and requires cooperations, agreements, recommendations and standards. To facilitate this, the Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformationen was founded.

DINI

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that offers flexible copyright licenses for creative works, also in the spirit of Open Access.

Creative Commons

Various initiatives and declarations lead to a binding engagement on Open Access and advocate the implementation specifically.

Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)

The Budapest Open Access Initiative arises from a small but lively meeting convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute (OSI) on December 1-2, 2001. The purpose of the meeting was to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet.

Budapest Open Access Initative

Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

The Berlin Declaration was formulated at a meeting in Berlin (20-22.10.2003). The declaration was originally signed by German and other research organisations and has since found many more institutional signatories worldwide.

Berliner Erklärung

Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science

The Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science formulate the common goal of nonprofit organisations in the medical, scientific and publishing sector.

Principles

Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing

The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing is the summary of a conference held on April 11, 2003.

Bethesda Statement

OECD Erklärung

Declaration of the OECD about access to publicly funded research data. 

Declaration

ALL European Academies (ALLEA)

ALLEA engages with its Member Academies - also the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences - in the process of articulating the scientific communities needs and views in terms of making scientific publications (articles) and research data more easily accessible to researchers and society at large, and reflects on the appropriate framework for facilitating the re-use of data. How to ensure permanent access to digital content and how to overcome the barriers to the preservation of digitally stored output is another set of challenges.

The declaration

International search engines allow datamining for key words, authors, journals, date etc. in freely accessible document servers and archives - not only in one, but in all that meet metadata standards (typically according to the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative).

BASE

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic open access web resources. BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
BASE

Driver

Considered the largest initiative of its kind in helping to enhance repository development worldwide, DRIVER is a multi-phase effort whose vision and primary objective is to create a cohesive, robust and flexible, pan-European infrastructure for digital repositories, offering sophisticated services and functionalities for researchers, administrators and the general public.
Today DRIVER offers a search portal across the network of freely accessible digital repositories with over 3'500'000 scientific publications, harvested from more than 295 repositories, from 38 countries.
DRIVER

OAIster

OAIster is a project of Michigan University. U.S., and allows access to document servers worldwide - at present almost 23 million publications from nearly 1'100 repositories. 
OAIster

Scientific publications published with Open Access reach a greater audience. This can lead to increased citation fequency.

A number of studies have been carried out on the effect of Open Access on citations to articles, showing the increased citation impact that Open Access can bring. Alma Swan wrote a summary of all impact studies to date about Open Access and its citation impact. 
Study and results

A further option to measure the coverage and reuse of scientific publications are for example Article Level Metrics, part of the larger altmetrics movement. Article Level Metrics place this information onto the articles themselves, so that the entire academic community can assess their value.
Article Level Metrics

So far the available data includes

• Article usage statistics: HTML pageviews, PDF and XML downloads
• Citations from the scholarly literature, currently from Web of Science, PubMed Central, Scopus and CrossRef
• Social Bookmarks: currently from CiteULike and Connotea
• Comments, left by readers of each article
• Notes, left by readers
• Blog posts, aggregated from Nature Blogs, Bloglines and ResearchBlogging
• Ratings, left by readers of each article