In 2020, thirteen scholars representing scholar-led, free academic journals published a collaborative Manifesto on Open Access in the humanities and social sciences (HASS), on this platform . It was translated into Italian and Spanish, and circulated worldwide. The Manifesto has joined other initiatives like Libraria and the Open Library of Humanities fighting for a fairer, convivial, and less extractive publication system for academic books and journals . The Manifesto signals that ‘alternatives exist’ to scholarly publishing with commercial publishers, and we should work with them, given the commercial sector’s orientation, power, and often huge margins . Since we released the Manifesto, Open Access publishing has been boosted by international initiatives and agreements over the last two years, but not always in ways that our Manifesto supported. In this short article, we ask where we are now, how have things changed, and what can we still do?