The Story

Standards and frameworks have been a way to argue for and shape a more engaging form of science. In 2002, the Budapest Open Access Initiative defined “open access” as follows:

“By “open access” to [peer-reviewed] 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” (Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002).

We here find many of the topics covered so far, from the desire to share knowledge as widely as possible – much like the Babylonians had libraries –, to the need for proper acknowledgement of researchers who are in charge of their work’s integrity – this final aspect is a tenet of academic freedom. Another point we have encounted and that is important in the above Initiative is copyright, which is seen as a tool to be employed, by a new sort of academic journal, to “ensure permanent open access to all the articles they publish” (ibid).