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Mid February was the official launch of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI): BOAI understands itself as a project for the promotion of free online access of research texts in all academic fields. The initiative, sponsored by George Soros’ Open Society Institute, seeks to become a framework organization for different initiatives for free online access in the academic field. Important first step is a proclamation in favour of open access, which can be signed as an individual or organization. Signing the initiative indicates a commitment to open access:
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
Open access is defined as follows:
"The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment. Primarily, this category encompasses their peer-reviewed journal articles, but it also includes any unreviewed preprints that they might wish to put online for comment or to alert colleagues to important research findings. There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. 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."
The discussion on free online access to academic texts is about various serious problems. On the one side, academic freedom, additionally to the freedom of research and teaching, is understood as free access to the results of academic research. On the other side, publishers and some authors are interested in a commercial exploitation of these results. The Open Access Initiative seems to avoid a radical position and postulates only free access to texts which scholars give to the public without expectation of payment.
Regarding the nature of the question, I see some similarities to the discussion about software licences. There are also plenty of possible positions between the two extremes of full access and free commercialization of any source code on the one hand and the strict protection even of the most frequent and ingeniously simple algorithm on the other hand.
In my opinion, it seems to be an important aspect in this discussion that open access encourages equal relations between scholars from the North and the South. That does not mean that working conditions etc. in the North and the South could be balanced by free online access to significant research results; the digital divide can not be surmounted in one day – nor the “academic divide”. But the Budapest Open Access Initiative is a first step towards a confrontation with these problems. That’s why I support them.
What does other people think about that?
Budapest Open Access Initiative:
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/
How to support open access:
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/help.shtml
Open Archives Initiative (OAI):
http://www.openarchives.org/
Kind regards,
Bertold Bernreuter
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Academic freedom as free online access?