Open Access Initative

Abstract

Spearheaded by the Open Society Institute (OSI), the Open Archives Initiative was given a boost at a conference held in Budapest in January 2003. The goal was to encourage the academies of Central and Eastern Europe, the key institutes of the region, for triggering a course of activities that will be able to claim the substantial rights of scholarship back from the commercial publishers and big data-base-providers. The rationale for this is that R&D is paid for by the public, so the results should be freely available to the public - as well as to peergroups for stimulating advancement of science. The almost paradigmatic pursuit in the form of two paramount forms of open access is now subject to experimentation the digital world over: 1) the institutional repositories (storing documents of self-archiving), and 2) the release of alternative e-journals. Here we give an overview of the issue of open archives and open access and make a survey of the major initiatives of the field.