From meetings convened by researchers, scientists, publishers, scholars and academic institutions, including libraries, came three statements or declarations concerning open access to which their signatories pledged a committment to open access to research. The three major statements are linked and described below:
Budapest Open Access Initiative (Feb. 2002) BOAI calls foronline access to the scientific and scholarly research texts, through self-archiving or open access journals, without asking for any kind of royalty or payment. As the BOAI public statement puts it, "[p]rimarily, this category encompasses...peer-reviewed journal articles, but it also includes any unreviewed preprints that [scholars] might wish to put online for comment or to alert colleagues to important research findings." It does not include books, including textbooks, from which their authors would prefer to generate revenue. It does not include any non-scholarly writings, such as novels or news.
Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003) The Bethesda statement also calls for free and unrestrict access to scholarly works; however, it mandates deposit into at least one online repository immediately upon publication of the work.
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humnanities (Oct. 2003) With the Berlin Declaration, there is a move beyond knowledge to include cultural heritage, and beyond primary literature to include original research results, raw data and metadata, course materials, digital representations of pictorial and graphical materials, and scholarly multimedia material.
Open access policies are increasingly being adopted by individual institutions, including universities and publishers. These policies typically endorse open access principles and define guidelines by which persons or publications covered by the policy should disseminate research and knowledge.
Locating Institutional Open Access Policies
To locate institutional open access policies from around the world, use the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP).
To locate the Open Access policies of publishers and journals, use the SHERPA/RoMEO site.
To locate the Open Access policies of research funders, use the SHERPA/JULIET site.
Select Campus Open Access Policies
