Open Access
What is open access?
Open access is a new paradigm in scholarly communication. The idea is to make all publications available for free via the internet. One of the first groups to establish open access was the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). So far the initiative has been signed by over 4770 individuals and 435 organisations (June 2008). According to the BOAI, "[r]emoving access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge."
The BOAI defines open access as follows: "By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself." (BOAI)
Purpose
On this website we attempt to provide an overview over open access and present studies and papers analysing its impact on science. This page will also be a hub for various resources and events connected to open access.
Berlin 6 Open Access Conference
Five years ago, researchers from a wide range of disciplines came together to draft the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, which stressed the significance of unrestricted access to research results via the Internet for the future of academic publishing.
The fifth follow-up conference to this event, which took place 11-13 November 2008 in Düsseldorf (Germany), dealt with the global state of Open Access in 2008: its successes as a model for making scientific information more broadly available and the challenges it creates for established models of disseminating research results.
For further information, please visit the Berlin 6 Open Access Conference Website.
Resources
- Armbruster, Chris. Cyberscience and the Knowledge-Based Economy, Open Access and Trade Publishing: From Contradiction to Compatibility with Nonexclusive Copyright Licensing. Policy Futures in Education 6(4), 2008. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=938119
- Stempfhuber, Maximilian. Die Rolle von 'open access' im Rahmen des wissenschaftlichen Publizierens. Publikationsverhalten in unterschiedlichen wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen. Beiträge zur Beurteilung von Forschungsleistungen, 2008. http://www.humboldt-foundation.de/pls/web/wt_show.text_page?p_text_id=7815
- Van Orsdel, Lee C. and Kathleen Born. Periodicals Price Survey 2008: Embracing Openness. Library Journal 4/15/2008. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6547086.html
Links
- Alexander von Humboldt. 2008. Wissenschaftsorganisationen starten Schwerpunkte zur "Digitalen Information". http://www.humboldt-foundation.de/pls/web/wt_show.text_page?p_text_id=542606
- Berlin 6 Open Access Conference. http://www.berlin6.org/
- Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html
- Budapest Open Access Initiative. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/index.shtml
- Informationsplattform Open Access (in German). http://www.open-access.net/
