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MISTICA: Open Access Initiative

From: Rosa Maria Torres ([email protected])
Date: Wed Feb 20 2002 - 16:53:49 AST

Budapest Open Access Initiative BOAI: http://www.soros.org/openaccess

>To be useful, research must be used. To be used (read, cited, applied,
>extended) it must be accessible. There are currently 20,000
>peer-reviewed journals of scientific and scholarly research worldwide,
>publishing over 4 million articles per year, every single one of them
>given away for free by its researcher-authors and their
>research-institutions, with the sole goal of maximizing their uptake and
>usage by further researchers, and hence their impact on worldwide
>research, to the benefit of learning and of humanity.
>
>Yet access to those 4 million annual research articles can only be had
>for a fee. Hence they are accessible only to the lucky researchers at
>that minority of the world's research institutions that can pay for
>them. And even the wealthiest of these institutions can only afford a
>small and shrinking proportion of those annual 20,000 journals. The
>result is exactly as if all those 4 million articles had been written
>for royalties or fees, just the way most of the normal literature is
>written, rather than having been given away for free by their authors
>and their institutions for the benefit of research and humanity.
>
>As a consequence, other researchers' access to all this work, and hence
>its potential impact on and benefit to research progress, is being
>minimized by access tolls that most research institutions and
>individuals worldwide cannot afford to pay.
>
>Those access tolls were necessary, and hence justified, in the Gutenberg
>era of print-on-paper, with its huge real costs, and no alternatives.
>But they are no longer necessary or justified, and are instead in direct
>conflict with what is best for research, researchers, and society, in
>today's PostGutenberg era of on-line-eprints, when virtually all of
>those Gutenberg costs have vanished, and those remaining costs can be
>covered in a way that allows open access.
>
>The Budapest Open Access Initiative is dedicated to freeing online
>access to this all-important but anomalous (because give-away)
>literature, now that open access has at long last become possible, by
>
>(I) providing universities with the means of freeing online access to
>their own annual peer-reviewed research output (as published in the
>20,000 established journals) through institutional self-archiving,
>
>as well as by
>
>(II) providing support for new alternative journals that offer open
>online access to their full text contents directly (and for established
>journals that are committed to making the transition to offering open
>full-text access online).
>
>It is entirely fitting that it should be George Soros's Open Society
>Institute that launches this initiative to open access to the world's
>refereed research literature at last. Open access is now accessible,
>indeed already overdue, at a mounting cost in lost benefits to research
>and to society while we delay implementing it. What better way to open
>society than to open access to the fruits of its science and
>scholarship, already freely donated by its creators, but until now not
>freely accessible to all of its potential users? Fitting too is the fact
>that this initiative should originate from a part of the world that has
>known all too long and all too well the privations of a closed society
>and access denial.
>
>Please have a look at the BOAI at http://www.soros.org/openaccess and,
>if you or your organization are implementing, or planning to implement
>either Strategy I or Strategy II, I hope you will sign the BOAI, either
>as an individual or an organization.
>
>Sincerely,
>Stevan Harnad

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