Open and Shut?: Budapest Open Access Initiative reaffirmed and refreshed

Use the link to access the interview transcript.  “Although the history of the Open Access (OA) movement can be traced back to at least 1994 (or even earlier), its birth is widely held to have taken place at the 2001 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). Certainly, it was at this point that the term ‘open access’ was first used.  The BOAI emerged from a meeting held in Budapest that had been organised by George Soros’ then named Open Society Institute (OSI). The OSI also kick-started the movement with a grant of $3 million.  OSI’s involvement has allowed a great deal to be achieved over the last ten years. However, much remains to be done. So in February this year OSI — now known as the Open Society Foundations(OSF) — organised a second Budapest meeting (BOAI-10).  Here a ‘diverse coalition’ of OA publishers, funders, librarians, scholarly societies, infrastructure managers, advocates and strategists reaffirmed and refreshed the BOAI, and subsequently drew up 28 recommendations ‘to make research freely available to all online’. These recommendations were finally published yesterday.  It is worth noting that a great deal has happened in the OA space this year. We have seen the rise and fall of the infamous Research Works Act (RWA). We have witnessed the so-called Academic Spring — which included a boycott by researchers of Elsevier, the world’s largest subscription publisher. We have seen a US petition in favour of OA attract more than 25,000 signatures. And we have seen the publication of the Finch Report in the UK, followed by the announcement of a new OA policy from Research Councils UK (RCUK). Finally, the European Commission has made a new commitment to ‘improve access to scientific information produced in Europe.’  However, this is not all good news. The Finch Report and the RCUK OA policy in particular have proved highly controversial, with OA critics expressing great concern that they will prove counter-productive, and could ‘set worldwide open access back by at least a decade’.  One intriguing question that arises from the policy errors of Finch/RCUK is whether they might have been avoided had the BOAI-10 recommendations been published earlier in the year. After all, as OA advocate Stevan Harnad points out, RCUK’s policy is in direct contradiction with these recommendations.  We might also wonder whether, in the wake of Finch/RCUK, OA advocates can any longer maintain that OA will resolve the affordability problem that led many to join the OA movement in the first place.  BOAI-10 was chaired by Alma Swan, the director of European advocacy for SPARC. Below I publish an email interview with Swan about the meeting and the recommendations — a discussion that inevitably raised the above questions in my mind.  Swan argues that OA c