> Below you will find the opening letter from Stevan Harnad -- see also
> the BOAI website at http://www.soros.org/openaccess for additional
> information.
>
> Katja Mruck
>
> --->
>
> To be useful, research must be used. To be used (read, cited, applied,
> extended) it must be accessible. There are currently 20,000
> peer-reviewed journals of scientific and scholarly research worldwide,
> publishing over 4 million articles per year, every single one of them
> given away for free by its researcher-authors and their
> research-institutions, with the sole goal of maximizing their uptake and
> usage by further researchers, and hence their impact on worldwide
> research, to the benefit of learning and of humanity.
>
> Yet access to those 4 million annual research articles can only be had
> for a fee. Hence they are accessible only to the lucky researchers at
> that minority of the world's research institutions that can pay for
> them. And even the wealthiest of these institutions can only afford a
> small and shrinking proportion of those annual 20,000 journals. The
> result is exactly as if all those 4 million articles had been written
> for royalties or fees, just the way most of the normal literature is
> written, rather than having been given away for free by their authors
> and their institutions for the benefit of research and humanity.
>
> As a consequence, other researchers' access to all this work, and hence
> its potential impact on and benefit to research progress, is being
> minimized by access tolls that most research institutions and
> individuals worldwide cannot afford to pay.
>
> Those access tolls were necessary, and hence justified, in the Gutenberg
> era of print-on-paper, with its huge real costs, and no alternatives.
> But they are no longer necessary or justified, and are instead in direct
> conflict with what is best for research, researchers, and society, in
> today's PostGutenberg era of on-line-eprints, when virtually all of
> those Gutenberg costs have vanished, and those remaining costs can be
> covered in a way that allows open access.
>
> The Budapest Open Access Initiative is dedicated to freeing online
> access to this all-important but anomalous (because give-away)
> literature, now that open access has at long last become possible, by
>
> (I) providing universities with the means of freeing online access to
> their own annual peer-reviewed research output (as published in the
> 20,000 established journals) through institutional self-archiving,
>
> as well as by
>
> (II) providing support for new alternative journals that offer open
> online access to their full text contents directly (and for established
> journals that are committed to making the transition to offering open
> full-text access online).
>
> It is entirely fitting that it should be George Soros's Open Society
> Institute that launches this initiative to open access to the world's
> refereed research literature at last. Open access is now accessible,
> indeed already overdue, at a mounting cost in lost benefits to research
> and to society while we delay implementing it. What better way to open
> society than to open access to the fruits of its science and
> scholarship, already freely donated by its creators, but until now not
> freely accessible to all of its potential users? Fitting too is the fact
> that this initiative should originate from a part of the world that has
> known all too long and all too well the privations of a closed society
> and access denial.
>
> Please have a look at the BOAI at http://www.soros.org/openaccess and,
> if you or your organization are implementing, or planning to implement
> either Strategy I or Strategy II, I hope you will sign the BOAI, either
> as an individual or an organization.
>
> Sincerely,
> Stevan Harnad
>
> --
> FQS - Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung
> / Forum: Qualitative Social Research (ISSN 1438-5627)
>
> English -> http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs/fqs-eng.htm
> German -> http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs/fqs.htm
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