the Budapest Open Access Initiative

“ Publishers should refrain from lobbying against governments acting in the public interest, and refrain from lobbying against research institutions acting in the interests of researchers and research. Publishers should disavow lobbying campaigns carried out in their name by their professional or trade associations against the public interest and the interests of researchers and research. The minority of subscription-based publishers who do not yet allow author-initiated green OA, without payment or embargo, should adopt the majority position. ”

“ Today we’re no longer at the beginning of this worldwide campaign, and not yet at the end. We’re solidly in the middle, and draw upon a decade of experience in order to make new recommendations for the next ten years. ”

“ Every research funding agency, public or private, should have a policy assuring that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles reporting funded research are deposited in a suitable repository and made OA as soon as practicable.
Deposits should be made as early as possible, ideally at the time of acceptance, and no later than the date of formal publication. When publishers will not allow OA on the funder’s terms, funder policies should require grantees to seek another publisher. ”

“ We should create better mechanisms for communicating and coordinating with one another. We should reach out to our academic colleagues, to the academic press, and the mainstream non-academic press. The academic and non-academic media are better informed about OA, and more interested in it, than at any time in our history. ”

“ OA repositories typically depend on permissions from others, such as authors or publishers, and are rarely in a position to require open licenses. However, policy makers in a position to direct deposits into repositories should require open licenses, preferably CC-BY, when they can. OA journals are always in a position to require open licenses, yet most of them do not yet take advantage of the opportunity. We recommend CC-BY for all OA journals. ”

“ We encourage the development of materials to explain how journal impact factors have been misused, and how alternative metrics can better serve the purposes for which most institutions have previously used impact factors. As impact metrics improve, we encourage further study into the question whether OA and OA policies increase research impact. ”

“ Research institutions should also support the establishment of worldwide, open standards for metadata and querying that publishers and repositories could implement to make OA research more discoverable, retrievable, and useful. ”

“ University policies should respect faculty freedom to submit new work to the journals of their choice. University policies should encourage but not require publication in OA journals, and should help faculty understand the difference between depositing in an OA repository and publishing in an OA journal. ”

“ The list of essential tools will evolve over time, but includes OA repositories and journals, free and open-source repository software, free and open-source journal management software, tools for text- and data-mining, directories of OA journals and repositories, directories of university and funder policies, providers of open licenses, digital preservation services, current awareness services, services for cross-linking and persistent URLs, and search engines. ”

“ OA benefits research and researchers, and the lack of OA impedes them. OA for publicly-funded research benefits taxpayers and increases the return on their investment in research. It has economic benefits as well as academic or scholarly benefits. ”

“ The worldwide campaign for OA to research articles should work more closely with the worldwide campaigns for OA to books, theses and dissertations, research data, government data, educational resources, and source code. ”

“ Supporting peer-reviewed OA journals can be particularly important for journals with a more limited audience, such as journals focusing on national law in smaller countries or journals published in a local language, and for journals where publication fees are inappropriate, such as review journals which solicit review articles from authors. ”

“ The OA community should act in concert more often. Wherever possible, OA organizations and activists should look for ways to coordinate their activities and communications in order to make better use of their resources, minimize duplication of effort, strengthen the message, and demonstrate cohesion. ”

“ When subscription-based or non-OA journals permit any kind of self-archiving, or deposit into OA repositories, they should describe what they permit in precise human-readable and machine-readable terms, under an open standard. ”