Breaking the paywalls that guard our shared cultural and scientific heritage
In short: From the halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the frontiers of global research, a movement is gaining momentum. Institutions are increasingly abandoning restrictive copyright models in favor of open access, treating knowledge and art not as private assets, but as global public goods for everyone to use.
The concept of open access manifests differently depending on whether the subject is art or academic research. In February 2017, The Metropolitan Museum of Art launched its Open Access policy, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies. This initiative makes images of artworks deemed to be in the public domain freely available for unrestricted use. By utilizing the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) designation, the museum allows the public to access and use these images at no cost, removing traditional barriers to cultural engagement.
In the scientific and diplomatic realms, open access is being framed as a tool for maximizing global impact. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has established a policy—published in December 2025—to ensure that research funded by public money is easy to find and ready to use. This mandate requires that new FCDO-funded research, and certain existing agreements, be made immediately available online without restrictions on reuse, beyond proper attribution. The goal is to accelerate learning and help evidence reach real-world decisions in international development and diplomacy more quickly.
However, the movement is pushing toward even more radical shifts. The group behind Plan S, which has already accelerated open-access trends, announced a new proposal in October 2023. This plan seeks to revolutionize science publishing by requiring all versions of an article, including peer-review reports, to be published openly from the start. Crucially, it proposes that authors—rather than publishers—should decide when and where to first publish their work, and that this should occur without authors having to pay fees, potentially upending the traditional subscription-based model of academic journals.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Press Conference to Announce New Open Access Policy
- Also: Open access: expanding the reach of FCDO research - Global Research and Technology Development
- Also: Open-access reformers launch next bold publishing plan
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