Background

The Budapest Open Access Initiative arose from a small but lively meeting convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute (now Open Society Foundations [OSF]) on December 1-2, 2001.

The purpose of the meeting was to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet. The participants represented many points of view, many academic disciplines, and many nations, and had experience with many of the ongoing initiatives that make up the open access movement.

In Budapest they explored how the separate initiatives could work together to achieve broader, deeper, and faster success. They explored the most effective and affordable strategies for serving the interests of research, researchers, and the institutions and societies that support research. Finally, they explored how OSI and other foundations could use their resources most productively to aid the transition to open access and to make open-access publishing economically self-sustaining. The result is the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), which offered the first definition of open access. The BOAI is a statement of principle, a statement of strategy, and a statement of commitment.

The initiative was signed by the Budapest participants and thousands of individuals and organizations from around the world who represent researchers, universities, laboratories, libraries, foundations, journals, publishers, learned societies, and kindred open-access initiatives. We invite the signatures, support, and participation of the entire global scientific and scholarly community.

Read the Declaration