History of the Open Access movement
Origins of the Open Access Movementxx
In 1991, when Paul Ginsparg set up the server ArXiv at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LAN-L) to make physics preprints freely accessible, he laid the foundation stone for the Open Access (OA) movement. Other leading activists and co-founders of the movement include Peter Suber, Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, who is the author of the Weblog Open Access News and the SPARC alliance's Newsletter, and the Hungarian born cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad, the founder and editor of the Cognitive Sciences Eprint Archive (Cogprints) and the mailing list American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum, to name but two of his many projects.
Prerequisites for archiving
The creation of toll-free document archives was made possible by the development of software called EPrints with which scholarly and scientific documents can be archived in such a way that other scholars and scientists can access them without charge and search the entire archive contents. In 1999, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was set up to ensure that metadata are harvestable across servers. Since then, the OAI has developed standards for efficient cross-server research.
Public stance
In the year 2000, in an open letter circulated via the Internet, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) called on scientific publishers to make research reports that appeared in their journals openly accessible in an online public library within six months of the initial publication date. Otherwise the signatories would neither publish in, edit or review for, or personally subscribe to the journal in question.
The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) was launched in the Hungarian capital in December 2001 at a meeting of the Open Society Institute (OSI). The participants – national and international scholars and scientists representing many disciplines – called for free, unrestricted online access to research articles in all academic fields.
In June 2003 representatives of funding agencies, libraries, publishers and scholarly societies issued the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing. Four months later, at the Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities conference organised by the Max Planck Society, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was launched. It has since been signed by representatives of leading European and U.S. research institutes and universities. The signatories pledge to promote the OA paradigm, for example by encouraging researchers to make their findings openly accessible.
The serials crisis
The so-called serials crisis has acted as a catalyst for the development of the OA movement and its spread beyond the scientific sector. From the mid-nineties onwards, journal prices spiralled, especially in the natural sciences. University libraries were forced to cancel subscriptions which considerably reduced access to relevant scientific and scholarly knowledge and information.
The untenable multiple subsidisation of scientific publications by the public sector was a further catalyst for the OA paradigm. This subsidisation is referred to as multiple "because the salaries and the editing work are paid for by the State. In addition, as a rule printing costs are also subsidised by public funders. And finally the publications are bought back by libraries at sometimes astronomical prices so that they can be made available to scholars and scientists in their own institutions" (Mruck, Gradmann & Mey 2004; cf. also Graf 2003). The promotion of OA overcomes these structures by making research results freely available for all to access online.
