EIFL has had an outsized impact on the development of Open Access globally. Since the EIFL-OA programme launched 20 years ago, EIFL has been at the forefront of raising awareness of, and support for, Open Access. EIFL's unique ability to work with their national library consortia in over 35 developing and transition countries, allows the organization to facilitate the open sharing of the wealth of research produced in these countries so as to create a global research commons, one of the greatest ambitions of the Open Access movement.