Open access, equity, and strong economy in developing and transition countries: Policy perspective

Since January 2007, Ukraine has a law mandating open access to publicly funded research. Most of the Parliament members supported it. The law is already the second parliamentary inquiry mandating the Cabinet of Ministers to take actions on creating favorable conditions for developing open access repositories in archives, libraries, museums, and scientific and research institutions with open access conditions to publicly funded research. Nevertheless, the "bottom-up" approaches of Ukrainian universities and research centers as well as political support from the principle legislative body in the country, have still not resulted in a network of well-functioning institutional repositories. The article highlights recent open access developments and presents the lists of open access benefits for the developing and transition countries and regions.