Today is the fourth anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), the first initiative to call for OA journals and OA archives as complementary strategies, the first to be accompanied by significant funding, the first to use the term open access, and the first of the major public statements (along with the Bethesda and Berlin statements) to form the consensus definition of OA that now structures the OA movement. The BOAI emerged from a December 2001 meeting in Budapest convened by the Open Society Institute, which committed $3 million to implement the BOAI vision. The BOAI was officially issued on February 14, 2002. (Disclosure: I helped draft the BOAI and receive support from OSI.)
I wish I had time to review the last four years of OA activity and show the influence of the BOAI. I don't, but I can offer these pieces: Open Access in 2005, Open Access in 2004, and Open Access in 2003. I didn't write an OA review for 2002, but I did review OA archiving activity in the first six months after the BOAI launched. And for the details missing from these reviews, there's always my timeline.
Happy birthday, BOAI, and Happy Valentines Day.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/14/2006 07:52:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
