Information about open access

Open Access is a term designating free and unrestricted online access to scientific and scholarly information. Scientific and scholarly work that is the result of publicly financed research should be available free of charge to the interested public worldwide. Open Access works can be reused provided that this does not infringe the rights of the author(s).

The declaration of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), which was published in 2002, was the first of numerous national and international initiatives that called for free access to scientific and scholarly information. Although the Budapest declaration made explicit reference to peer-reviewed journals, it nevertheless formed the basis for all later OA declarations.

A milestone of the Open Access movement was the Berlin Declaration published on 22 October 2003. In contrast to the BOAI, the Berlin Declaration did not restrict open access to scientific and scholarly literature and called instead for Open Access to scientific knowledge and cultural heritage in all their forms. According to this view, Open Access publications also include metadata and digital representations of images and graphics.