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Lately there has been a lot of discussion about the need to make research results accessible to a worldwide readership. The main factors that led to the Open Access movement are:

  • the restricted access to scientific results
  • the slow pace of the traditional publication procedure
  • the limited impact of research on the development and improvement of the quality of life in a given country (especially in the under-developed countries)
  • the ever-increasing fees of the subscription-based journals
  • the ever-decreasing budgets of university and institution libraries
  • the growing internationalization of science and research
  • the increasing needs of users
  • the reduced public funds available for subscriptions to scientific journals
  • the rapid development of the Internet and the spread of electronic means of communication.

Milestone Initiatives on Open Access

Also known as the BBB definition, the three public statements that have mostly influenced the open access movement by laying down the open access principles are:

The Budapest Open Access Initiative - ΒOAI (February 2002)

This statement made the first reference to the term ‘open access'. It invites scientists from all over the world to participate in this effort by making their research results freely accessible online.

Read the statement here.

The Bethesda Statement of Open Access Publishing (June 2003)

The participants' intention was to raise awareness of the biomedical scientific community about providing open access to primary scientific literature. Their main goal was to create a set of principles about open access publishing endorsed by all the stakeholders (funding agencies, scientific societies, publishers, librarians, research institutions and individual scientists).

Read the statement here.

The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (October 2003)

Being one of the most influential declarations, it has been signed by a large number of scientific organizations and institutions. The declaration calls upon researchers to make their scientific material (preprints as well as raw data) freely available over the internet. Users can consult the research results and use them for subsequent work, on condition that the original author is acknowledged.

Read the declaration here.

Other significant initiatives on Open Access

May 2010- The Alambra Declaration on Open Access

The Declaration calls for the mobilization of stakeholders in Open Access in South European Countries in developing Open Access. It recommends developing common policies, forming Open Access working groups at national level, fostering initiatives to promote Open Access, developing alternative publishing business models, safeguarding the quality of Open Access publication, fostering repository development. The Declaration concludes with an Action Plan for developing Open Access in the countries of South Europe.

The Alambra Declaration
The Alambra Declaration in Greek

 

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