The digital revolution came with the promise of immeasurable opportunities for our researchers to produce more impactful science faster, and in the realm of scholarly communication it inspired the common vision of barrier-free access to knowledge characterized by the understanding that scholars should retain rights over their works: open access. Today, the academic narrative has moved on and expanded to Open Science, of which Open Access is just one component, but we are still very far from having delivered to our researchers the benefits of unencumbered access to knowledge that we had promised. One of the greatest roadblocks to this goal—and certainly the most expensive—is the subscription business model underlying the bulk of scholarly publishing. It is high time that higher education and research organizations leverage their economic power to drive the open access transition so that we can finally deliver on our promise.