Within the last years the awareness about scholarly communication has been raised which is important for the formulation of future policies in this area. This development can be deduced from the growing number of Open Access journals and repositories which are mostly supported by the scholar community. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) for instance currently counts around 8,300 journals. Still in many domains even more papers are published in Open Access repositories which together form a worldwide database. “It is obvious that there is a large academic interest in Open Access”, says Alma.

Together with the growing number of Open Access journals and repositories there is a growing number of policies that support or even demand the publication of contents in Open Access formats. These policies can be established either by research institutions or by research funders. It has turned out that without the corresponding policies the number of open accessible publications is far lower. Thus entrenched behavior has to be changed and the awareness of people for Open Access should be raised with the help of corresponding policies in future where the research funders inhabit a key role.