Looking back at 20 years of Open Access publishing at Nucleic Acids Research | Nucleic Acids Research | Oxford Academic

"When Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) was launched in 1974, the concept of an Open Access publication model was not on anyone’s radar. Instead, the focus was on how to ensure that the articles we published were of the very highest quality in the various fields of research involving nucleic acids. In the early 1990s, as the early internet became established, Paul Ginsparg founded an archive of papers in physics called the arXiv (https://info.arxiv.org/about/index.html) that became very popular (https://www.cs.cornell.edu/∼ginsparg/physics/blurb/pg01unesco.html). These papers were posted online and freely available to all. However, it was not until 2000 that related open access initiatives in biomedical sciences were launched, leading to the indexing service and full-text archive PubMed Central by NIH (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov), and the for-profit publisher BioMed Central by the then Current Science Group (https://sciencenow.com/aboutus.html), allowing biomedical researchers to freely access some selected published papers online...."