The official beginnings of the open access movement were several manifestos in the early 2000s: the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), the Bethesda Open Access Publishing Statement (2003), and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in Science and Technology. Humanities (2003). The policies set forth in these statements form the core principles of the modern open access movement, but also had several predecessors, such as arXiv, a public repository of scientific papers. So while some disciplines were sharing knowledge freely before best open source database the publication of these three manifestos, it is these three manifestos that weave open access into today's cohesive movement. It is worth noting that all three statements require free and freely published articles to be considered open access, but free is still more common in practice. In 2012, the Budapest Open Access Initiative acknowledged that "we should not delay freeness in order to be free, and we should not stop free when we can be free."
New knowledge is created by synthesizing current scholarship and then building on it. If current scholarship is behind a paywall, only those who can afford it can really contribute to advancing our knowledge of a subject. Non-open access scholarly journals can be very expensive, making scholarly research a costly endeavor for those with limited research budgets. Academic libraries subscribe to a large number of scholarly journals, and many libraries allow members of the local community to access library journals if they visit the library in person, but the escalating cost of journal subscriptions is a burden on library budgets. An annual subscription for a single institution can cost a university library anywhere from $5,000 to $600,000. Open Access research is not trapped by paywalls imposed by often exorbitant subscription prices, and Open Access research can be read by anyone with Internet access. Open access levels the playing field so that independent scholars, adjunct faculty at small colleges, and tenured faculty at major research universities have the same access.