Chemistry Central Blog

10th Anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative

Today marks ten years since the launch of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI).

The purpose of the BOAI was to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet. Central to this was a clear definition of what constitutes ‘open access’:

“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. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”

Since the Budapest Declaration was published, open access publishing has experienced rapid growth. The Directory of Open Access Journals now lists close to 7500 journals, compared to just 33 journals ten years ago, and it is expanding at a rate of almost 3 journals per day. With a far greater awareness of open access today, and with funders increasingly requiring open access to research and data, we look forward to seeing even more growth over the next ten years.

Posted by Bailey Fallon at 14:52    Comments (0)