Rough notes on the Budapest Open Access Initiative

The Budapest Open Access Initiative is one of the seminal documents in the history of the Open Access movement. It’s a remarkable and important document. These are my (very) rough notes on it. The notes are mostly critical, which perhaps hides my appreciation for the vision in the document, which is extraordinary. If you find yourself agreeing with much of what’s said, you may wish to sign on to the initiative. The text of the initiative is below, with my notes interspersed:

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge.

The economics is more complex than that. Most scientists make their research available also in part for reputation, which they can convert into material wealth through jobs, promotions, and grants.

The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.

For various reasons, this kind of free and unrestricted online availability, which we will call open access, has so far been limited to small portions of the journal literature. But even in these limited collections, many different initiatives have shown that open access is economically feasible, that it gives readers extraordinary power to find and make use of relevant literature, and that it gives authors and their works vast and measurable new visibility, readership, and impact. To secure these benefits for all, we call on all interested institutions and individuals to help open up access to the rest of this literature and remove the barriers, especially the price barriers, that stand in the way. The more who join the effort to advance this cause, the sooner we will all enjoy the benefits of open access.

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.

Modern version control systems enable us to go a great deal further, so that multiple authors can work on the same corpus of work, while still enabling people to tease apart who contributed what. If such permissive licensing were allowed – i.e., open source research – then we’d get a good deal more involuntary collaboration. In my opinion, the history of science shows that this would be a good thing.

It would also be nice to have the role of machine-readability more explicitly emphasized. Indeed, one can imagine a notion of “Extreme Open Access”, which not only provides human- and machine-readable versions of material, but also powerful APIs on top of these basic services.

While the peer-reviewed journal literature should be accessible online without cost to readers, it is not costless to produce. However, experiments show that the overall costs of providing open access to this literature are far lower than the costs of traditional forms of dissemination.

Journals traditionally provide (a) printing; (b) distribution; (c) archiving; (d) editorial oversight (including services such as copyediting); and (e) co-ordination of refereeing. (a) and (b) are becoming irrelevant. Points (d) and (e) are becoming increasingly possible to outsource completely. (c) is more problematic, although things like DOIs and archive.org help. As a result the value added by journals is plummeting. Of course, there are potentially many other ways the journals could add value, and some already do – the media services offered by Science and Nature immediately come to mind.

With such an opportunity to save money and expand the scope of dissemination at the same time, there is today a strong incentive for professional associations, universities, libraries, foundations, and others to embrace open access as a means of advancing their missions. Achieving open access will require new cost recovery models and financing mechanisms, but the significantly lower overall cost of dissemination is a reason to be confident that the goal is attainable and not merely preferable or utopian.

To achieve open access to scholarly journal literature, we recommend two complementary strategies.

I. Self-Archiving: First, scholars need the tools and assistance to deposit their refereed journal articles in open electronic archives, a practice commonly called, self-archiving. When these archives conform to standards created by the Open Archives Initiative, then search engines and other tools can treat the separate archives as one. Users then need not know which archives exist or where they are located in order to find and make use of their contents.

II. Open-access Journals: Second, scholars need the means to launch a new generation of journals committed to open access, and to help existing journals that elect to make the transition to open access. Because journal articles should be disseminated as widely as possible, these new journals will no longer invoke copyright to restrict access to and use of the material they publish. Instead they will use copyright and other tools to ensure permanent open access to all the articles they publish.

Presumably, through the use of ideas like copyleft.

Because price is a barrier to access, these new journals will not charge subscription or access fees, and will turn to other methods for covering their expenses. There are many alternative sources of funds for this purpose, including the foundations and governments that fund research, the universities and laboratories that employ researchers, endowments set up by discipline or institution, friends of the cause of open access, profits from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts, funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers themselves. There is no need to favor one of these solutions over the others for all disciplines or nations, and no need to stop looking for other, creative alternatives.

This is nicely done. It emphasizes that the old business model is no longer viable, and that the need is to search creatively for new business models, without prescribing what the new business model should be.

Open access to peer-reviewed journal literature is the goal. Self-archiving (I.) and a new generation of open-access journals (II.) are the ways to attain this goal. They are not only direct and effective means to this end, they are within the reach of scholars themselves, immediately, and need not wait on changes brought about by markets or legislation. While we endorse the two strategies just outlined, we also encourage experimentation with further ways to make the transition from the present methods of dissemination to open access. Flexibility, experimentation, and adaptation to local circumstances are the best ways to assure that progress in diverse settings will be rapid, secure, and long-lived.

The Open Society Institute, the foundation network founded by philanthropist George Soros, is committed to providing initial help and funding to realize this goal. It will use its resources and influence to extend and promote institutional self-archiving, to launch new open-access journals, and to help an open-access journal system become economically self-sustaining. While the Open Society Institute’s commitment and resources are substantial, this initiative is very much in need of other organizations to lend their effort and resources.

Apparently, Soros was a student of Karl Popper’s at the London School of Economics – the Popper who wrote “The Open Society and its Enemies”, which is on my to-read shelf.

We invite governments, universities, libraries, journal editors, publishers, foundations, learned societies, professional associations, and individual scholars who share our vision to join us in the task of removing the barriers to open access and building a future in which research and education in every part of the world are that much more free to flourish.

February 14, 2002 Budapest, Hungary

Leslie Chan: Bioline International

Darius Cuplinskas: Director, Information Program, Open Society Institute

Michael Eisen: Public Library of Science

Fred Friend: Director Scholarly Communication, University College London

Yana Genova: Next Page Foundation

Jean-Claude Guédon: University of Montreal

Melissa Hagemann: Program Officer, Information Program, Open Society Institute

Stevan Harnad: Professor of Cognitive Science, University of Southampton, Universite du Quebec a Montreal

Rick Johnson: Director, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)

Rima Kupryte: Open Society Institute

Manfredi La Manna: Electronic Society for Social Scientists

István Rév: Open Society Institute, Open Society Archives

Monika Segbert: eIFL Project consultant

Sidnei de Souza: Informatics Director at CRIA, Bioline International

Peter Suber: Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College & The Free Online Scholarship Newsletter

Jan Velterop: Publisher, BioMed Central