Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project, and Darius Cuplinskas, director of the Information Program at the Open Society Foundations, want open access to become the default method and vote for the development of effective open-access policies.

The economic benefits of open access are estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The decision to place the results of the Human Genome Project in the public domain without delay, for example, helped ensure that scientists everywhere can use the data. The $3.8-billion investment in the project has had an estimated economic impact of $796-billion.