OA Week has always meant a great deal to me personally because I helped to create the first ever event during my tenure at PLOS. For the last couple of years, I’ve posted my annual personal perspective on OA Week here.

This year, I want to share what happened when my employer, nonprofit publisher Annual Reviews (AR), asked itself the question “open for whom?” and how the answer changed our mission which is synthesizing and integrating knowledge for the progress of science and the benefit of society.

The addition of the three words “benefit of society” to our mission gave rise to programs that seek to provide equity in knowledge because content behind a paywall can only be read by those who can afford a subscription.

Finding transitional business models to support resources such as the commissioned reviews that AR publishes, isn’t simple. AR invites experts to synthesize primary research, and commissioned content is not suited to APCs. Funder mandated OA excludes reviews, so AR’s choice to adopt a new business model created in support of OA (Subscribe to Open) is an exciting development, and the chance to introduce new audiences to our articles.

Here are three examples of initiatives from Annual Reviews that represent significant milestones on our OA journey:

Knowable Magazine, launched in 2017 with support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is a freely available (CC licensed) online publication that reports on established evidence across a variety of disciplines and makes scientific knowledge accessible to all. For those who want to take a deeper dive into the literature, free access to the HTML of relevant Annual Reviews articles is available.

Two additional programs include:

• The Annual Review of Public Health (2017 and 2018 volumes) are Open Access with funding support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
• Subscribe to Open redirects library subscription budgets to the costs of making journals available to all, if all libraries participate. Five journals are included in the 2020 pilot for this new model including the Annual Review of Public Health.

I am happy, as ever, to share this update for Open Access Week 2019 and wish everyone a good one.