From: Frederick Friend <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 1:02 PM

February 14 2012 is the tenth anniversary of the launch of the
Budapest Open Access Initiative, which resulted from what the BOAI
web-site http://www.soros.org/openaccess describes as “a small but
lively meeting convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute
(OSI) on December 1-2, 2001”. As one of the privileged participants in
that meeting I can confirm the liveliness of the discussions!

The BOAI vision of an “unprecedented public good” achievable through
“completely free and unrestricted access” to peer-reviewed journal
literature has inspired support for open access in research
communities across the globe, and the twin strategies of
self-archiving by authors in repositories and/or publication in open
access journals have formed the basis of policies over the past ten
years to implement open access. Some authors and some research funders
have supported one strategy more strongly than the other, but all open
access policies have sprung from a realisation of the opportunity to
achieve beneficial change in access to and re-use of publicly-funded
research outputs.

The case for open access has been widely-accepted and the number of
research articles world-wide currently available on open access is
growing fast (see Richard Poynder’s blog of June 2011
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2011/06/open-access-by-numbers.html).
However, open access articles are still in a minority. Many authors
sympathetic to open access are faced with barriers to repository
deposit or open access publication embedded in the current
infrastructure for scholarly communication. They may find that a
subscription publisher does not accept an institutional mandate for
open access, or that their institution is worried about the effect
upon research assessment of publication in an open access journal, or
that open access funding is only available during the lifetime of a
grant – all problems (and many more like them) capable of being worked
through, but these are time-consuming difficulties faced by open
access authors not faced by authors publishing in subscription
journals.

On the agenda for many political organizations and research funders is
consideration of how a higher proportion of the research they fund can
result in open access articles. A mandate for open access is a good
start but the mandate needs to be backed up with an infrastructure
which makes deposit in an open access repository or publication in an
open access journal as easy for an author as signing away all rights
to a subscription-based publisher. The second decade of BOAI should
see the barriers to open access removed, a majority of articles
available on open access, and the benefit of an “unprecedented public
good” from open access achieved.

Fred Friend

Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL