Informationsplattform Open Access: Initiatives and policy documents

Initiatives and policy documents

 

Initiatives

In recent years, a growing number of institutions and projects have committed themselves to the principle of Open Access (OA) and pledged to support the OA idea by initiating and/or signing calls and declarations.

In the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) launched in February 2002 the Open Society Institute (OSI) undertook to "use its resources and influence to extend institutional self-archiving, to launch new open-access journals and to help an open-access journal system to become economically self-sustaining". By the end of May 2008 some 4,770 individuals and 434 institutions had signed the BOAI declaration.

The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing issued in June 2003 was directed to the biomedical research community and stressed the necessity to disseminate the results of research quickly and efficiently. It emphasised the opportunity (and the obligation) to share scientific results, ideas and discoveries free of charge with the scientific community and the public.

The EU project European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO) promotes OA principles through its own policy (Charter of ECHO) and supports scientific and cultural institutions and projects in Europe in their efforts to make Europe's cultural heritage openly accessible.

The signatories of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to knowledge in the sciences and humanities which was launched in October 2003 urge that full use be made of the opportunities for scientific and scholarly communication and publication afforded by the Internet. By May 2008 more than 250 institutions from all over the world had pledged their support for the Declaration.

Another project which supports the OA movement is the Scholary Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an alliance of academies, university libraries and research organisations which promotes and develops cost-effective alternatives to traditional publication strategies.

In early 2007, a group of leading European scientific organisations initiated a Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results directed to the European Commission. The signatories express their support for the implementation of OA in the scientific publishing sector and call on the Commission to intensify its efforts to promote OA publications. By May 2008, some 27,000 individuals and institutions had signed the petition.

In its Recommendation for the management of intellectual property issued in April 2008, the European Commission strongly supports OA. It recommends that its member states "promote the broad dissemination of knowledge created with public funds, by taking steps to encourage open access to research results, while enabling, where appropriate, the related intellectual property to be protected" (p. 3).

In addition, more and more universities are committing themselves to OA and enabling toll-free archiving in their repositories and free access to scientific and scholarly documents. An overview of institutions' self-archiving policies can be found in the Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP).

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Further policy documents and statements

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Research organisations

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Funding agencies

Details of research funders' OA policies can be found under:

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Scholarly societies

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Universities

An overview of universities which have committed themselves to implementing OA policies can be found in the Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP). Moreover, on their websites many universities give details of their OA policies.

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