15th Anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative
Nicole Allen
“An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good.” - The Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002
Fifteen years ago, the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) brought together a diverse group of stakeholders and launched a worldwide campaign for open access (OA) to all new peer-reviewed research. The BOAI deliberately drew together existing projects to explore how they might “work together to achieve broader, deeper, and faster success.”
“By "open access" to this [research] 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 BOAI is a groundbreaking initiative that has been widely embraced by stakeholders, and that has stimulated significant progress toward the global understanding and adoption of open access. The BOAI was the first to define the term “open access,” and its definition has since become canonical, frequently cited in the context of open access policies, practices, and laws around the world. Also, the BOAI’s recognition of complementary strategies for implementing OA has been adopted extensively across disciplines and in numerous countries.
The 15th anniversary of the BOAI offers an opportunity to take stock of our collective progress. To do this, feedback was solicited through an open survey, and we received responses from 69 countries around the world. Additionally, we have convened a small working group to synthesize the community feedback and use it to reflect on the values, impact, and continued relevance of the BOAI. The Working Group will review and digest the responses received and provide updated recommendations to reflect the current status of the movement.
Later this week, we’re looking forward to the release of a comprehensive reflection on where the open access movement has been and where it may be headed, written by Jean-Claude Guédon, one of the original drafters of the BOAI, and a noted thought leader in the open access community.
Juan Pablo Alperin, Assistant Professor and an Associate Director of the Public Knowledge Project, Simon Fraser University
Virginia Barbour, Executive Director, Australian Open Access Strategy Group
Leslie Chan, University of Toronto, Scarborough & Founder, Bioline International
Martin Eve, Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London
Eve Gray, Research Consultant in the IP Law Unit, University of Cape Town
Melissa Hagemann, Senior Program Officer, Open Society Foundations
Heather Joseph, Executive Director, SPARC
Iryna Kuchma, Open Access Program Director, EIFL
Erin McKiernan, Assistant Professor, National Autonomous University of Mexico
David Prosser, Executive Director, Research Libraries UK
Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director, Confederation of Open Access Repositories
Nick Shockey, Director, Right to Research Coalition
Peter Suber, Director, Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication
Jan Velterop, Senior Consultant, Open Access/Scholarly Publishing
Iara Vidal, PhD in Information Science, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro