The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is a public statement of principles relating to

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

to the research literature, which was released to the public on February 14, 2002. It arose from a convening in

Budapest Budapest is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns of Hungary, most populous city of Hungary. It is the List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, tenth-largest city in the European Union by popul ...

organized by the

Open Society Institute Open Society Foundations (OSF), formerly the Open Society Institute, is an American grantmaking network founded by business magnate George Soros. Open Society Foundations financially supports civil society groups around the world, with the s ...

on December 1–2 2001 to promote open access, which at that time was also known as ''Free Online Scholarship''. This small gathering of individuals is recognized as one of the major defining events of the open access movement. As of 2021, the text of the initiative had been translated to 13 languages. On the 10th anniversary of the initiative in 2012, the original initiative was reaffirmed and supplemented with a set of recommendations for achieving open access in the next 10 years.

Content

The opening sentence of the BOAI encapsulated the purpose and potential of an

movement:

Definition

The document contains one of the first and most widely used definitions of open access, which was subsequently reaffirmed, 10 years after it was first published:

Strategy and funding

In 2001, the BOAI recommended two complementary strategies in order to achieve open access to scientific literature. First, scholars should follow the practice of

self-archiving Self-archiving is the act of (the author's) depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles, as ...

which is when authors deposit a copy of their own text to open archives on the internet. Preferably these archives should conform to the standards of the

Open Archives Initiative The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was an informal organization, in the circle around the colleagues Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze, Michael L. Nelson and Simeon Warner, to develop and apply technical interoperability standards for archives t ...

and make it easy for users to find the texts. Second, scholars should launch new online open access journals and help other periodicals to adapt the principles of open access.

10th anniversary update

In 2012 on the 10th anniversary of the original initiative, a new statement was released which reaffirmed the BOAI's definition of open access, its goals, strategies and commitment to make progress. It also contained "the new goal that within the next ten years, OA will become the default method for distributing new peer-reviewed research in every field and country", policy recommendations for universities, research funding agencies, recommendations on choosing the optimal licence ( CC-BY), designing open access repository infrastructure, and advocacy for achieving open access.

20th anniversary recommendations

In recognition of the 20th anniversary of the original declaration, the BOAI2020 Steering Committee released four high-level recommendations alongside a set of subrecommendations.

Impact

Along with the 2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities and 2003 Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, the Budapest initiative defined open access to research, lay out strategies for achieving this, and began the "open access movement" or "social movement" phase of open access advocacy. The initiative was sponsored with a US$3 million grant from the

Signatories

The 16 original signatories of the Budapest Open Access Initiative included prominent early advocates for open access: * Leslie Chan of Bioline International * Darius Cuplinskas, Melissa Hagemann, Rima Kupryte of

* István Rév, Open Society Institute, Open Society Archives *

Michael Eisen Michael Bruce Eisen (born April 13, 1967) is an American computational biologist and the former editor-in-chief of the journal eLife. He is a professor of genetics, genomics and Developmental biology, development at University of California, Berkel ...

of the

Public Library of Science PLOS (for Public Library of Science; PLoS until 2012) is a nonprofit publisher of open-access journals in science, technology, and medicine and other scientific literature, under an open-content license. It was founded in 2000 and launched its ...

* Fred Friend († April 23, 2014) of

University College London University College London (Trade name, branded as UCL) is a Public university, public research university in London, England. It is a Member institutions of the University of London, member institution of the Federal university, federal Uni ...

* Yana Genova of the Next Page Foundation * Jean-Claude Guédon of the

Université de Montréal The Université de Montréal (; UdeM; ) is a French-language public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university's main campus is located in the Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood of Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce on M ...

Stevan Harnad Stevan Robert Harnad (Hernád István Róbert, Hesslein István, born 1945) is a Canadian cognitive scientist based in Montreal. Early life and education Harnad was born in Budapest, Hungary. He did his undergraduate work at McGill University an ...

of the

University of Southampton The University of Southampton (abbreviated as ''Soton'' in post-nominal letters) is a public university, public research university in Southampton, England. Southampton is a founding member of the Russell Group of research-intensive universit ...

Université du Québec à Montréal The (UQAM; ), is a French language, French-language public university, public research university based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is the largest constituent element of the system. UQAM was founded on April 9, 1969, by the government o ...

* Rick Johnson of the

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition The scholarly method or scholarship is the body of principles and practices used by scholars and academics to make their claims about their subjects of expertise as valid and trustworthy as possible, and to make them known to the scholarly pu ...

(SPARC) * Manfredi La Manna of the Electronic Society for Social Scientists * Monika Segbert, Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) Project consultant * Sidnei de Souza, Informatics Director at CRIA, Bioline International *

Peter Suber Peter Dain Suber (born November 8, 1951) is an American philosopher specializing in the philosophy of law and open access to knowledge. He is a Senior Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Director of the Harvard Office fo ...

, Professor of Philosophy,

Earlham College Earlham College is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Richmond, Indiana. The college was established in 1847 by the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and has a strong focus on Quake ...

and The Free Online Scholarship Newsletter * Jan Velterop of

BioMed Central BioMed Central (BMC) is a United Kingdom-based, for-profit scientific open access publisher that produces over 250 scientific journals. All its journals are published online only. BioMed Central describes itself as the first and largest open a ...

In February 2002, the signatories released BOAI in a version that could be signed by the public. , over 5,900 individuals and 800 organizations had signed it. By 2023, this was over 6800 individuals and 1600 organizations.

References

External links

* Budapest Open Access Initiative FAQ
Open Access News
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080117192748/http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html , date=2008-01-17 by

Open access statements Access to Knowledge movement 2001 documents