Science in the Open » Blog Archive » On the 10th Anniversary of the Budapest Declaration

“Ten years ago today, the Budapest Declaration was published... BioMedCentral had been publishing for a year or so, PLoS existed as an open letter, Creative Commons was still focussed on building a commons and hadn’t yet released its first licences... and it was to be another year before Tim O’Reilly popularised the term “Web 2.0” arguably marking the real emergence of the social web. In that context the text of the declaration is strikingly prescient... But at the same time, and again remember this is at the very beginning of the development of the user-generated web, the argument is laid out to support a networked research and discovery environment... But for me, the core of the declaration lies in its definition... Core to this definition are three things. Access to the text... a limitation on restrictions and a limitation on the use of copyright to only support the integrity and attribution of the work – which I interpret in retrospect to mean the only acceptable licences are those that require attribution only. But the core forward looking element lies in the middle of the definition, focussing as it does on specific uses; crawling, passing to software as data... In limiting the scope of acceptable restrictions and in focussing on the power of automated systems, the authors of the Budapest declaration recognised precisely the requirements of information resources that we have more recently come to understand as requirements for effective networked information. Ten years ago... the core characteristics were identified that would enable research outputs to be accessed and read, but above all integrated, mined, aggregated and used in ways that their creators did not, could not, expect...”