UNESCO Announces Open Access Policy

The United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) will make its digital publications available free of charge and under an open license. UNESCO’s open access repository will launch in July 2013, have a multilingual interface, and contain hundreds of digital UNESCO publications available for download.

Janis Karklins, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, announced the new open access policy during the opening of the World Summit on the Information Society Forum on May 13.

“Researchers from all countries, but especially from developing and least developed countries will benefit and capitalize on Open Access to knowledge. Our new policy will enable us to increase the visibility, accessibility, and rapid distribution of our publications,” said Karklins.

Resources that are published by UNESCO after June 1 will be immediately deposited into the repository. For resources that are published by external publishers, UNESCO will respect an embargo period up to 12 months. A Creative Commons license was not specifically stated in the announcement, but the policy appears to be similar to CC BY for UNESCO published resources and CC BY-NC-ND for resources published externally.

UNESCO is the first member of the United Nations to adopt such an open access policy for its publications. Read the full policy here.

Read the full announcement here.