The emergence of Open Access

In December 2001, the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) was established, a consortium of national and international scientists and scholars from the humanities and natural sciences, demanding for free and unpaid access to scientific journal literature in all academic fields.

This demanded in 2002:

All literature published by scientists who do not expect to be paid for it should be freely accessible on the Internet. open-access.net

The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) Declaration defines scientific literature:

"Open Access means that this literature should be free of charge and publicly accessible on the Internet, so that interested parties can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, refer to, and otherwise use the full texts in any conceivable legal way, without financial, legal, or technical barriers beyond those associated with Internet access itself. In all matters of reprinting and distribution, and in all matters of copyright in general, the only restriction should be to leave the respective authors in control of their work and ensure their right to have their work properly recognized and quoted." BOAI

At the end of October 2003, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was signed by renowned European and American research organizations and universities as part of the conference „Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities“ of the Max Planck Society. The signatories undertake to support the further development of the Open Access concept by, for example, encouraging researchers to publish their results in Open Access. The Berlin Declaration calls for possible uses that go far beyond the purely royalty-free use and the statements of the Budapest Declaration and the Bethesda Statement. For them, Open Access means not only the use of content free of charge, but also permission to:

"copy, use, distribute, transmit and publicly reproduce these (...) - in any digital medium and for any responsible purpose - and to create and distribute adaptations thereof, provided that authorship is correctly indicated". open-access.net

In addition, it also expands the object area and no longer understands Open Access materials to mean only scientific texts:

"Open Access publications include original scientific research results as well as original data, metadata, source material, digital representations of image and graphic material, and scientific material in multimedia form." open-access.net

"The Budapest Declaration was updated in 2012 while maintaining its commitment to open access to scientific information and formulated recommendations for the implementation of Open Access, in particular with regard to guidelines, licensing, Open Access infrastructures and services and their sustainability.“ open-access.net