The Dutch government is currently in the hot seat - the Netherlands is currently in charge of the European Union council of ministers, a rotating position that changes every six months.

And they're leading what they hope to be a Europe-wide initiative in open-access publishing, making more academic papers free to the public as soon as they're published.

Declan Butler, reporting in Nature News, wrote that the Dutch government is making open-access publishing "one of its top priorities."

The Dutch have already put their money where their mouths are - the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has negotiated deals to make many Dutch research papers in high-level publishing houses, such as Springer and Elsevier, open-access at no extra charge.

Deals like the ones VSNU has struck could be a valuable counter to the proliferation of "hybrid" open-access journals, which make academic papers available at controversially high prices.

A successful, sustainable push for universal open-access will require global cooperation, and it will be hard to convince most mainstream publishers to put values over profit. But this sounds like a step in a healthy direction for Europe.

Because we believe that income should not be a barrier to accessing scientific information, ecancermedicalscience is an open-access journal that operates a unique "pay what you can afford" model. Read our journal here.