The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication.
Hybrid open access, or open access by article, is a model where an author has the choice of paying upfront to make the article freely accessible. Other articles in the journal are only available by subscription. This provides a way for traditional journals to let authors meet funding and institutional mandate needs. It is a way for those who need to publish in traditional journals to provide access to their scholarly work for all.
While these traditional publishers do allow access to all for these articles, they may not meet the other criteria for true open access as defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative.
Many academic institutions around the world adopted Open Access Self-Archiving Policies that require faculty and researchers to deposit their final, peer-reviewed drafts in an Open Access institutional or central repository.
Selected OA facts and initiatives:
A growing number of funding agencies and organizations are requiring that grant recipients make the results of their work open for public access. Here is a brief, non-exhaustive list of funders with these mandates. A more complete list can be found on the Sherpa Juliet site.