An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge sharing. The new technology is the Internet. The public good they make possible is the worldwide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.
The kind of free and unrestricted online availability we mean is called open access. Despite being limited to a portion of journal literature, various initiatives have demonstrated that open access is economically feasible. Open access gives readers extraordinary power to find and use relevant literature, and gives authors and their works unprecedented visibility, readership, and impact. We invite all institutions and individuals interested in removing access barriers—especially price barriers—to participate in this effort. As the number of supporters of this initiative grows, the benefits of open access will become increasingly visible to all.
Scholarly literature made available to the world without expectation of payment should be freely accessible online. This category includes primarily peer-reviewed journal articles, but also unrefereed preprints that authors wish to share for feedback or to alert colleagues to significant research findings. There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to scientific literature. In this declaration, open access means that this literature is freely available on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.
The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. Even though readers can access peer-reviewed literature online for free, open-access publishing is not costless. Experience shows, however, that the overall costs of open access are much lower than those of traditional distribution models.
Open access broadens the scope of information dissemination while offering opportunities for savings. There is also strong motivation for professional societies, universities, libraries, foundations, and other institutions to embrace open access to improve their services. Achieving open access will require new cost-recovery models and financing mechanisms, but the significant reduction in overall distribution costs shows that the goal is not merely preferable or idealistic but achievable.
We recommend two complementary strategies to achieve open access to scholarly journal literature:
I. Self-Archiving: First, scholars need tools and assistance to deposit their refereed journal articles in open electronic archives, a practice commonly known as self-archiving. When these archives conform to standards created by the Open Archives Initiative, search engines and other tools can treat the separate archives as one, allowing users to search and access content without knowing which archives exist or where they are located.
II. Open-Access Journals: Second, scholars need the means to launch a new generation of journals committed to open access, and to help existing journals transition to this model. Since journal articles should reach the widest possible audience, these new journals will not use copyright to restrict access and use of the material they publish. Instead, copyright and other tools will be used to ensure the long-term availability of all published articles in open access.
Because price is a barrier to access, these new journals will not charge subscription or access fees, and will seek alternative funding models. Possible sources of funding include foundations and governments that support research, universities and laboratories employing researchers, endowments made to support scholarly communication, contributions from open access supporters, income from value-added services, and funds freed up by the cancellation of subscription-based journals.
To ensure the permanent preservation of all published content, the journal uses the PKP Preservation Network (
PKP PN) system integrated with the DergiPark platform.
The goal is open access to peer-reviewed journal literature. (I) Self-archiving and (II) open-access journals are the means to this end. They are not only direct vehicles for achieving open access but also ways to connect scholars with one another without waiting for market or legislative changes. In addition to supporting these two primary strategies, we encourage experimentation with other means for achieving open access. Flexibility, experimentation, and adaptation to local conditions will ensure that progress is rapid, secure, and long-lasting.
Dated: 14 February 2002
Budapest, Hungary