SHAPING THE NETWORK SOCIETY Patterns for Participation, Action, and Change http://www.cpsr.org/conferences/diac02
Tomorrow's information and communication infrastructure is being shaped today. But by whom and to what ends? Seattle: May 16-19 Questions: [email protected] Keynote Address on the Budapest Open Access Initiative http://cpsr.org/conferences/diac02/program.html Friday morning, May 17. Open Research Access for an Open Society Stevan Harnad ABSTRACT: Not all information is or can be free: Texts that authors write in order to sell them (books, magazine articles) are unlikely to become give-aways, even in the digital network era. But there is one form of information that is and always has been an author give-away, even though in the Gutenberg era it too had had to be sold, and that is peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific research articles. These are written for only one purpose: so that they should be used by other researchers (read, cited, applied). Their authors have never sought or received royalties or fees in exchange for them; it was only the inescapable expense of paper printing and distribution that had forced the journals that published them to recover their costs through subscription and license charges in the paper era. That era is now over, but nothing has yet changed. The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is dedicated to hastening and facilitating the optimal and inevitable outcome: the transition from toll-based access to toll-free online access to this special literature (20,000 peer-reviewed journals, 2 million articles annually, most of them currently inaccessible to most researchers because of the toll-barriers) through two strategies: (1) helping to promote author/institution self-archiving of authors' own peer-reviewed, published articles and (2) helping to promote the conversion of established journals to open access and the establishment of new open-access journals. The benefits of opening access to the research literature will be felt not only by researchers worldwide, but by society as a whole.
