BOAI 2017: Access Opening, Budapest Closing

It’s ironic that billionaire George Soros (who is less wealthy than billionaire Bill Gates but has done a lot more philanthropy, both absolutely and proportionately) is today being notably vilified in a hate campaign by Hungary’s incipient dictator, Viktor Orban, who is expelling the Central European University (founded by Soros, and the best university in Hungary) while blaming its founder for Hungary’s ills. (Meanwhile Orban is busy becoming a billionaire -- in Hungarian Forints stolen from EU funds and Hungarian tax-payers) Soros’s Open Society Institute was also the one that founded and funded the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) that launched OA 15 years ago. (But I suspect that yet another US billionaire will find a way to trump Orban’s odia with his own...)