---------- Forwarded message ---------- List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:47:09 +0200 From: Iryna Kuchma <iryna.kuc...@eifl.net> Reply-To: boai-fo...@ecs.soton.ac.uk To: boai-forum <boai-fo...@ecs.soton.ac.uk> Subject: [BOAI] Budapest Open Access Initiative anniversary
[Forwarded message from Frederick Friend via LIBLICENSE discussion list] From: Frederick Friend <ucyl...@ucl.ac.uk> List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 1:02 PM February 14 2012 is the tenth anniversary of the launch of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which resulted from what the BOAI web-site http://www.soros.org/openaccess describes as âa small but lively meeting convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute (OSI) on December 1-2, 2001â. As one of the privileged participants in that meeting I can confirm the liveliness of the discussions! The BOAI vision of an âunprecedented public goodâ achievable through âcompletely free and unrestricted accessâ to peer-reviewed journal literature has inspired support for open access in research communities across the globe, and the twin strategies of self-archiving by authors in repositories and/or publication in open access journals have formed the basis of policies over the past ten years to implement open access. Some authors and some research funders have supported one strategy more strongly than the other, but all open access policies have sprung from a realisation of the opportunity to achieve beneficial change in access to and re-use of publicly-funded research outputs. The case for open access has been widely-accepted and the number of research articles world-wide currently available on open access is growing fast (see Richard Poynderâs blog of June 2011 http://poynder.blogspot.com/2011/06/open-access-by-numbers.html). However, open access articles are still in a minority. Many authors sympathetic to open access are faced with barriers to repository deposit or open access publication embedded in the current infrastructure for scholarly communication. They may find that a subscription publisher does not accept an institutional mandate for open access, or that their institution is worried about the effect upon research assessment of publication in an open access journal, or that open access funding is only available during the lifetime of a grant â all problems (and many more like them) capable of being worked through, but these are time-consuming difficulties faced by open access authors not faced by authors publishing in subscription journals. On the agenda for many political organizations and research funders is consideration of how a higher proportion of the research they fund can result in open access articles. A mandate for open access is a good start but the mandate needs to be backed up with an infrastructure which makes deposit in an open access repository or publication in an open access journal as easy for an author as signing away all rights to a subscription-based publisher. The second decade of BOAI should see the barriers to open access removed, a majority of articles available on open access, and the benefit of an âunprecedented public goodâ from open access achieved. Fred Friend Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL [ Part 2: "" ] -- To unsubscribe from the BOAI Forum, use the form on this page: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/forum.shtml?f [ Part 3: "Attached Text" ] _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal