[BOAI] Ten Years On, Researchers Embrace Open Access - Blog post re BOAI 10 on soros.org

[Iryna Kuchma]

Blog post re BOAI 10 on soros.org
To mark the 10th anniversary of the BOAI -
http://blog.soros.org/2012/02/ten-years-on-researchers-embrace-open-access/

Ten Years On, Researchers Embrace Open Access
*February 14, 2012 | by Melissa
Hagemann<http://blog.soros.org/author/melissa-hagemann/>
*

How long does it take for an idea to turn into a movement for change? And
how long before that movement achieves its goals? Today, the tenth
anniversary of the Budapest Open Access
Initiative<http://www.soros.org/openaccess>,
seems like a good time to ask these questions.

The term “Open Access” (OA), the free online availability of research
literature, was first coined at an Open Society sponsored meeting in
Budapest in December 2001. The Information
Program<http://www.soros.org/initiatives/information>had supported the
distribution of hard copies of scientific journals to
universities in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and
was interested in harnessing the power of the internet to more easily put
academic research in the hands of those who could benefit.

So we brought together leaders who were exploring alternative publishing
models. The group hammered out a
declaration<http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read>that would provide
the public with unrestricted, free access to scholarly
research—much of which is publicly funded. The declaration, the Budapest
Open Access Initiative, urged academics to place their research in
institutional archives and it encouraged the creation of new open access
journals. The result? Ten years on, troves of scholarly research and
information—which had largely been the domain of elite universities and
wealthy countries who could afford it—are freely  available to the public.

Today, Open Access is at the forefront of discussions about scholarly
communications in the digital
age<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/science/open-science-challenges-journal-tradition-with-web-collaboration.html>.
Open Access  is taught in universities, debated in Parliaments, embraced
and opposed by publishers, and most importantly, mandated by over 300
research funders <http://roarmap.eprints.org/> and institutions, including
the largest funder of research in the world, the U.S. National Institutes
of Health. This rise to prominence is all the more remarkable when
considering how ambitious the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) was,
as it sought to change an $8 billion industry.  Few beyond the initial BOAI
participants shared the vision that change was possible.

The release of the BOAI declaration, urging publishers and academics to
make research freely available, was followed by two similar initiatives
that strengthened the base of support for Open Access:  the Bethesda
Statement <http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/bethesda.htm> from the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Berlin
Declaration<http://oa.mpg.de/files/2010/04/berlin_declaration.pdf>which
originated from the Max Planck Society.  While HHMI, Max Planck, and
OSF provided the framework, it has been the library and research
communities who have organized their members and driven the Open Access
agenda.

Today, scholarly content and research is freely available online to
doctors, patients, professors, and students around the world. Nearly 7,500
academic journals are readily accessible in the Directory of Open Access
Journals <http://www.doaj.org/> and more than 2,000 archives are included
in the Directory of Open Access Repositories <http://www.opendoar.org/>.

While much has been achieved to make research freely available, it’s fair
to say the BOAI was initially greeted with immense scepticism – even
ridicule – by the traditional scholarly publishing sector. Many of my
favorite milestones for the movement have to do with the gradual softening
of that initial stance, as some traditional publishers have begun to see
the value of Open Access to their business. The launch in 2006 of PLoS
One<http://www.plosone.org/home.action>,
the Open Access “mega-journal,” has been much copied by traditional
publishers, and has put its OA publisher, the Public Library of Science,
firmly in the black. The purchase of the OA publisher BioMed
Central<http://www.biomedcentral.com/>in 2008 by one of the two market
leaders in scholarly journal publishing,
Springer <http://www.springer.com/?SGWID=0-102-0-0-0>, further vindicated
the OA model.

We are also encouraged by support from major donors for medical research
and from academic institutions. The Wellcome
Trust<http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Policy/Spotlight-issues/Open-access/index.htm>in
the UK was the first funder in the world to mandate Open Access to the
research it funds.  Many of the schools of Harvard University have also
adopted OA mandates.  But the single most exciting development in this
field has been the National Institutes of Health
mandate<http://publicaccess.nih.gov/>,
launched in 2008, that requires research they fund using taxpayer money be
made publicly available. This mandate alone places $30 billion of research
in the hands of the public every year.

However the fight for open access to research has not been won.  The U.S.
Congress is considering reversing the NIH mandate in a bill – the Research
Works Act <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Works_Act> – backed by
traditional publishers.

Discussions of Open Access policies will be just one item on the agenda of
a gathering of OA leaders, taking place today and tomorrow in Budapest.  We
plan to develop a set of recommendations which will help guide the movement
over the next ten years. We will be exploring issues of sustainability,
what we can do to further support OA in developing and transition
countries, and what implications OA has for measuring the impact of
research, and encouraging its reuse. But just like the first meeting in
Budapest, we will be keeping the agenda as open as possible. We want to
encourage the creative thinking that led to the conception of Open Access
in the first place, thinking that has inspired a global movement which
cannot now be claimed by any single institution, but is a testament to the
power of a good idea to spread across institutional boundaries and
disciplines.
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