Dear Colleagues,

The theme of scholarly publishing has come up
here from time to time. One of the major issues
under consideration in different fields and
disciplines is the issue of open access.

This past weekend in Berlin, there was an
important conference on Open Access to Knowledge
in the Sciences and Humanities.

So far, the science have done well in developing
open access principles. See, for example,

http://www.biomedcentral.com/

and especially the Open Access Home Page.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/

We have further to go in our field, but it
sometimes occurs to me that the very fact
that our field is still growing its publishing
traditions and its publications may offer
advantages.

I post, below, the recent declaration from
Berlin.

Best regards,

Ken Friedman



Conference on
Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

20 - 22 Oct 2003, Berlinin Declaration

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

Preface

The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic
realities of distributing scientific knowledge and cultural heritage.
For the first time ever, the Internet now offers the chance to
constitute a global and interactive representation of human
knowledge, including cultural heritage and the guarantee of worldwide
access.

We, the undersigned, feel obliged to address the challenges of the
Internet as an emerging functional medium for distributing knowledge.
Obviously, these developments will be able to significantly modify
the nature of scientific publishing as well as the existing system of
quality assurance.

In accordance with the spirit of the Declaration of the Budapest Open
Acess Initiative, the ECHO Charter and the Bethesda Statement on Open
Access Publishing, we have drafted the Berlin Declaration to promote
the Internet as a functional instrument for a global scientific
knowledge base and human reflection and to specify measures which
research policy makers, research institutions, funding agencies,
libraries, archives and museums need to consider.

Goals

Our mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete if the
information is not made widely and readily available to society. New
possibilities of knowledge dissemination not only through the
classical form but also and increasingly through the open access
paradigm via the Internet have to be supported. We define open access
as a comprehensive source of human knowledge and cultural heritage
that has been approved by the scientific community.

In order to realize the vision of a global and accessible
representation of knowledge, the future Web has to be sustainable,
interactive, and transparent. Content and software tools must be
openly accessible and compatible.


Definition of an Open Access Contribution

Establishing open access as a worthwhile procedure ideally requires
the active commitment of each and every individual producer of
scientific knowledge and holder of cultural heritage. Open access
contributions include original scientific research results, raw data
and metadata, source materials, digital representations of pictorial
and graphical materials and scholarly multimedia material.

Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions:

1. 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.

2. 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.

Supporting the Transition to the Electronic Open Access Paradigm

Our organizations are interested in the further promotion of the new
open access paradigm to gain the most benefit for science and
society. Therefore, we intend to make progress by

* encouraging our researchers/grant recipients to publish their work
according to the principles of the open access paradigm.

* encouraging the holders of cultural heritage to support open access
by providing their resources on the Internet.

* developing means and ways to evaluate open access contributions and
online-journals in order to maintain the standards of quality
assurance and good scientific practice.

* advocating that open access publication be recognized in promotion
and tenure evaluation.

* advocating the intrinsic merit of contributions to an open access
infrastructure by software tool development, content provision,
metadata creation, or the publication of individual articles.

We realize that the process of moving to open access changes the
dissemination of knowledge with respect to legal and financial
aspects. Our organizations aim to find solutions that support further
development of the existing legal and financial frameworks in order
to facilitate optimal use and access.