Eighteen years ago the Budapest Open Access Initiative launched a worldwide campaign for open access (OA) to all new peer-reviewed research. The initiative grasped the chance offered by web technologies to change scholarly communication system and make the fullest use of possibilties opened by computers and networks to maximize accessibility and usability of research findings.  The library world has been an advocate of open access and there were also high expectations that open access will solve the affordability problem and constrain ever-increasing costs of scholarly journals.

The transition to open access has not been as quick as hoped. In 2016, the Open Access 2020 (OA2020) Initiative was launched to address this issue. One of the mechanisms OA2020 suggests to accelerate the transition to OA is to negotiate transformative agreements with publishers. Transformative agreements combine subscription fees for accessing publishers’ content with publishing costs (Article Processing Charges, or APCs) that are charged when authors publish articles in OA.  These new form of „Big Deals“ are yet not common is Baltic countries and only a few agreements with open acces publishing component have been signed.

in September 2018 a consortium of national research agencies and funders from twelve European countries launched initiative Plan S.  Plan S requires that, with effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional, and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo. The research funders from Baltic states have not joined the coalition yet.