The Rise of Open Access | Publishing blog | Royal Society

"Here at the Royal Society we introduced open access publishing as an option for authors in all our journals in 2006. This initiative (following an APC model with a CC-BY licence for articles) was welcomed by authors at the time and the proportion of authors choosing this option has risen steadily ever since (see graph). While some authors undoubtedly choose open access on principle, most probably do so in order to comply with their funder requirements. Indeed in the early years of open access at the Royal Society, most authors selecting this option were funded by Wellcome and it’s probably no coincidence that there has been even more marked growth since the introduction of open access policies by the UK Research Councils and many other major funders."