Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

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The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities is an international statement on open access and access to knowledge. It emerged from a conference on open access hosted in the Harnack House in Berlin by the Max Planck Society in 2003. [1]

Contents

Background

Following the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002 and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing in 2003, the Berlin Declaration was a third influential event in the establishment of the open access movement. Peter Suber has referred to the three events combined as the "BBB definition" of open access as the three overlap with and inform one another. [2]

The declaration was drafted at an October 2003 conference held by the Max Planck Society and the European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO) project. More than 120 cultural and political organizations from around the world attended. [1]

Statement

The statement itself was published on October 22, 2003. Acknowledging the increasing importance of the internet and the previous discussions on the need for open access, it offered the following definition of an open access contribution:

Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions: The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and long-term archiving.

It also encouraged researchers and institutions to publish their work in accordance with these principles, advocate for open access and help in the development and assessment of open access related tools and measures. [3]

Signatories

As of November 2022, there are 769 signatories of the declaration. [4]

Legacy

At a 2005 follow-up conference, the declaration was refined to two key principles: signatories should require researchers to deposit a copy of their work in an open access repository and encourage the publication of work in open access journals when available. Today these two concepts are often called "green OA" and "gold OA", respectively, and the two combined are referred to as an open-access mandate. [5]

In 2013, on the 10th anniversary of the declaration, a mission statement was published with a goal of ensuring that 90% of research is published within an open access model. [6]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access</span> Research publications distributed freely online

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright, which regulates post-publication uses of the work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Max Planck Society</span> Association of German research institutes

The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes. Founded in 1911 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, it was renamed to the Max Planck Society in 1948 in honor of its former president, theoretical physicist Max Planck. The society is funded by the federal and state governments of Germany.

The Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres is the largest scientific organisation in Germany. It is a union of 18 scientific-technical and biological-medical research centers. The official mission of the Association is "solving the grand challenges of science, society and industry". Scientists at Helmholtz therefore focus research on complex systems which affect human life and the environment. The namesake of the association is the German physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Budapest Open Access Initiative</span> 2002 statement on open access to research literature

The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is a public statement of principles relating to open access to the research literature, which was released to the public on February 14, 2002. It arose from a conference convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute on December 1–2, 2001 to promote open access which at that time was also known as Free Online Scholarship. This small gathering of individuals has been recognised as one of the major defining events of the open access movement. As of 2021, the text of the initiative had been translated to 13 languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free content</span> Nonrestrictive creative work

Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information is any kind of creative work, such as a work of art, a book, a software program, or any other creative content unrestricted by copyright and other legal limitations on use. These are works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and modified by anyone for any purpose including, in some cases, commercial purposes. Free content encompasses all works in the public domain and also those copyrighted works whose licenses honor and uphold the definition of free cultural work.

OPAR L'Orientale Open Archive is the institutional repository of the University of Naples "L'Orientale", designed according to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in Science and Humanities and the Messina Declaration ratified by CRUI in 2004. OPAR L'Orientale Open Archive is a digital repository, accessible to all. Registered users can deposit different items: articles, technical reports, Ph.D. theses, books, working papers and preprints, articles already appeared in journals, conference papers and chapters from books already published, training aid, dataset and more.

An open-access mandate is a policy adopted by a research institution, research funder, or government which requires or recommends researchers—usually university faculty or research staff and/or research grant recipients—to make their published, peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers open access (1) by self-archiving their final, peer-reviewed drafts in a freely accessible institutional repository or disciplinary repository or (2) by publishing them in an open-access journal or both.

Open scientific data or open research data is a type of open data focused on publishing observations and results of scientific activities available for anyone to analyze and reuse. A major purpose of the drive for open data is to allow the verification of scientific claims, by allowing others to look at the reproducibility of results, and to allow data from many sources to be integrated to give new knowledge.

The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing is a 2003 statement which defines the concept of open access and then supports that concept.

Open access to scholarly communication in South Africa occurs online via journals, repositories, and a variety of other tools and platforms. Compared to other African nations, open access in South Africa has grown quickly in recent years.

The following is a timeline of the international movement for open access to scholarly communication.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access in Germany</span> Overview of the culture and regulation of open access in Germany

Open access to scholarly communication in Germany has evolved rapidly since the early 2000s. Publishers Beilstein-Institut, Copernicus Publications, De Gruyter, Knowledge Unlatched, Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information, ScienceOpen, Springer Nature, and Universitätsverlag Göttingen belong to the international Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access in Italy</span>

Open access to scholarly communication in Italy has grown since the early 2000s. During an academic conference in Messina in November 2004, Italian universities joined the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, in Italy thereafter known as the "Declaration of Messina".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access in Belgium</span> Overview of the culture and regulation of open access in Belgium

In Belgium, open access to scholarly communication accelerated after 2007 when the University of Liège adopted its first open-access mandate. The "Brussels Declaration" for open access was signed by officials in 2012.

Open access scholarly communication of Norway can be searched via the Norwegian Open Research Archive (NORA). "A national repository consortium, BIBSYS Brage, operates shared electronic publishing system on behalf of 56 institutions." Cappelen Damm Akademisk, Nordic Open Access Scholarly Publishing, University of Tromsø, and Universitetsforlaget belong to the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. Norwegian signatories to the international "Open Access 2020" campaign, launched in 2016, include CRIStin, Norsk institutt for bioøkonomi, Norwegian Institute of Palaeography and Historical Philology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, University of Tromsø, University of Bergen, University of Oslo, and Wikimedia Norge.

In January 2008, Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian academics issued the "Belgorod Declaration" in support of open access to scientific and cultural knowledge. Russian supporters of the international "Open Access 2020" campaign, launched in 2016, include Belgorod State University, National Electronic Information Consortium (NEICON), and Webpublishers Association.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of open access</span>

The idea and practise of providing free online access to journal articles began at least a decade before the term "open access" was formally coined. Computer scientists had been self-archiving in anonymous ftp archives since the 1970s and physicists had been self-archiving in arXiv since the 1990s. The Subversive Proposal to generalize the practice was posted in 1994.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access in Australia</span> Overview of the culture and regulation of open access in Australia

Open access (OA) to academic publications has seen extensive growth in Australia since the first open access university repository was established in 2001 and OA is a fundamental part of the scholarly publishing and research landscape in Australia. There are open access policies at the two major research funders: The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and Australian Research Council (ARC) and around half of Australian Universities have an OA policy or statement. Open Access Australasia, the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL), and the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) are advocates for Open Access and related issues in Australia.

Open access in New Zealand consists of policies and norms affecting making research outputs, data, and education materials openly available. This is influenced by tertiary education institutions as well as national government and changing international norms. The New Zealand Government has applied open access principles to its own work, adopting the New Zealand Government Open Access Licensing Framework (NZGOAL). It has not mandated that these apply to schools or the tertiary sector or to research funding agencies. Some tertiary education institutions have developed their own open access guidelines or policies but neither of the two major research funding agencies in New Zealand—the Marsden Fund and the Health Research Council—have done so, unlike Australia, Canada, Europe or the United States.

Plan S is an initiative for open-access science publishing launched in 2018 by "cOAlition S", a consortium of national research agencies and funders from twelve European countries. The plan requires scientists and researchers who benefit from state-funded research organisations and institutions to publish their work in open repositories or in journals that are available to all by 2021. The "S" stands for "shock".

References

  1. 1 2 "Berlin Conferences". Max Planck Society.
  2. Suber, Peter (2012). Open Access (PDF). MIT Press. pp. 7–8. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-09-07. Retrieved 2015-10-19.
  3. "Berlin Declaration". Max Planck Society. Archived from the original on 2015-10-27. Retrieved 2015-10-19.
  4. "Berlin Declaration: Signatories", Openaccess.mpg.de, retrieved 23 November 2022
  5. Jacobs, Neil, ed. (2006). Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. Elsevier. pp. 17–18.
  6. "Mission Statement". Max Planck Society.