New open access recommendations ten years on from Budapest Open Access Initiative | Open Knowledge Foundation Blog

“The notion of open access – or making research freely usable by all, without cost or legal barriers – has been in the news quite a bit this year.  It received significant media coverage on the back on the so-called Academic Spring, and subsequent high profile activities and announcements in the UK, the US and the EU.  One of the most significant milestones for open access advocates in the recent past is the Budapest Open Access Initiative, an international conference which convened experts from around the world to build consensus around a shared definition of ‘open access’. It is widely referred to as one of the defining events in the history of open access advocacy.  Ten years after this event, a diverse group of academics, advocates, librarians, and legal and policy experts met in Budapest. Today the group has issued a series of new recommendations for the next ten years of open access... If you believe in open access, the ... [recommendations] ... are worth reading in detail – and contain lots of ideas on policy, licensing, infrastructure, sustainability, and advocacy.  Following are a couple of excerpts that might be of particular interest to readers of the OKFN’s blog.  Firstly, while there have been no shortage of debates about the legal and practical meaning of ‘open access’ and associated questions of licensing and strategy (resulting in various inflections: strong/weak, libre/gratis, green/gold, etc), the recommendations contain a clear endorsement of a strong conception of open access which only requires attribution with the CC-BY license (which is compliant with the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Definition): ‘ 2.1. We recommend CC-BY or an equivalent license as the optimal license for the publication, distribution, use, and reuse of scholarly work. [1] OA repositories typically depend on permissions from others, such as authors or publishers, and are rarely in a position to require open licenses. However, policy makers in a position to direct deposits into repositories should require open licenses, preferably CC-BY, when they can. [2] OA journals are always in a position to require open licenses, yet most of them do not yet take advantage of the opportunity. We recommend CC-BY for all OA journals. [3] In developing strategy and setting priorities, we recognize that gratis access is better than priced access, libre access is better than gratis access, and libre under CC-BY or the equivalent is better than libre under more restrictive open licenses. We should achieve what we can when we can. We should not delay achieving gratis in order to achieve libre, and we should not stop with gratis when we can achieve libre.’ Secondly, they explicitly suggest that open access advocates should more closely coordinate with advocacy for other forms of openness:  The worldwide campaign for OA to research articles should work more closely with the worldwide campaigns for OA to books, theses and dissertations, research data, government data, educational resources, and source code. If you’re interested in finding out more about the Open Knowledge Foundation’s open access activities you can join our open-access mailing list.”