During recent years an increasing number of governments, research funding bodies and research performing institutions started supporting open access policies to improve the access to the scientific publications resulting from the research they fund. We support self-archiving ('green' open access) and open access publishing ('gold' open access). With Open Access, the research is freely available to other interested parties all over the world. Open access enhances visibility, transparency, number of citations and availability while encouraging interdisciplinary research and opens the pathway to more collaborative research.