Budapest Open Access Initiative | Open Access: Toward the Internet of the Mind

"On February 14, 2002, a small text of fewer than a thousand words quietly appeared on the Web: titled the “Budapest Open Access Initiative” (BOAI), it gave a public face to discussions between sixteen participants that had taken place on December 1 and 2, 2001 in Budapest, at the invitation of the Open Society Foundations (then known as the Open Society Institute)....Wedding the old – the scientific ethos – with the new – computers and the Internet – elicited a powerful, historically grounded synthesis that gave gravitas to the BOAI. In effect, the Budapest Initiative stated, Open Access was not the hastily cobbled up conceit of a small, marginal band of scholars and scientists dissatisfied with their communication system; instead, it asserted anew the central position of communication as the foundation of the scientific enterprise. Communication, as William D. Harvey famously posited, is the “essence of science,” and thanks to the Internet, scientific communication could be further conceived as the distributed system of human intelligence...."