The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was an informal organization, in the circle around the colleagues Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze, Michael L. Nelson and Simeon Warner, to develop and apply technical interoperability standards for archives to share catalogue information (metadata). The group got together in the late late 1990s and was active for around twenty years. OAI coordinated in particular three specification activities: OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE and ResourceSync. All along the group worked towards building a "low-barrier interoperability framework" for archives containing digital content to allow people harvest metadata. Such sets of metadata are since then harvested to provide "value-added services", often by combining different data sets.
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access 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.
CogPrints is an electronic archive in which authors can self-archive papers in any area of cognitive science, including psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics, and many areas of computer science, philosophy, biology, medicine, anthropology, as well as any other portions of the physical, social and mathematical sciences that are pertinent to the study of cognition.
The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI-PMH must support representing metadata in Dublin Core, but may also support additional representations.
An institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution.
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 is recognised as one of the major defining events of the open access movement. The text of the initiative was translated to 13 languages.
Subbiah Arunachalam is a Chennai, India-based information consultant known for his campaigns in favour of open access for academic journals in developing countries. He has been associated with the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation.
The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a non-profit research initiative that is focused on the importance of making the results of publicly funded research freely available through open access policies, and on developing strategies for making this possible including software solutions. It is a partnership between the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University, the University of Pittsburgh, Ontario Council of University Libraries, the California Digital Library and the School of Education at Stanford University. It seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online environments.
EPrints is a free and open-source software package for building open access repositories that are compliant with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). It shares many of the features commonly seen in document management systems, but is primarily used for institutional repositories and scientific journals. EPrints has been developed at the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science and released under the GPL-3.0-or-later license.
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.
An open-access repository or open archive is a digital platform that holds research output and provides free, immediate and permanent access to research results for anyone to use, download and distribute. To facilitate open access such repositories must be interoperable according to the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Search engines harvest the content of open access repositories, constructing a database of worldwide, free of charge available research.
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.
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.
In Spain, the national 2011 "Ley de la Ciencia, la Tecnología y la Innovación" requires open access publishing for research that has been produced with public funding. The first peer-reviewed open access Spanish journal, Relieve, began in 1995. Publishers CSIC Press and Hipatia Press belong to the international Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.
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.
In Ukraine, a 2007 law requires open access publishing of research created through public funding. In January 2008, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian academics issued the "Belgorod Declaration on open access to scientific knowledge and cultural heritage." Ukrainian academics issued another statement in June 2009 in support of open access.
Open access scholarly communication of Greece is preserved in repositories maintained by several academic institutions.
Open access to scholarly communication in Hungary has developed in recent years through digital repositories and academic publishers, among other means. In 2008 several academic libraries founded the Hungarian Open Access Repositories (HUNOR) consortium.
