Open Access and Open Science: not one and the same thing – Institut de Recerca en Educació

"Although there is no agreed definition of Open Science today, it should not be confused with Open Access. Open Access is one of the ingredients of Open Science, which has been called for in the Budapest Open Access Initiative of 2002 Although there is no agreed definition of Open Science today, it should not be confused with Open Access. Open Access is one of the ingredients of Open Science, which has been called for in the Budapest Open Access Initiative of 2002, in the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing of 2003, and in the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities of 2003.

Open Access is, according to the Budapest Initiative, the “free availability [of scientific literature] on the public Internet, allowing any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or use them for any lawful purpose, without any financial, legal or technical barriers, other than those that are inseparable from those involved in accessing the Internet itself”, the only limitation being the authors’ “control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited”.

On the other hand, Open Science could be defined, according to the UNESCO Open Science Recommendation 2021, “as an inclusive construct that combines diverse movements and practices in order to make multilingual scientific knowledge openly available and accessible to all and reusable by all, to increase scientific collaborations and information sharing for the benefit of science and society, and to open up the processes of creation, evaluation and communication of scientific knowledge to social actors beyond the traditional scientific community”...."