Open Access movement

A variety of groups and parties have recently begun to promote open access to science and research, as well as open access publishing. The first to show interest in the field were individual university researchers, librarians and other academic citizens in different countries. Today, more and more universities and a wide range of research funders recommend, and outright require, research publications to be openly accessible.

The Open Access movement got broader international recognition in 2002 through the
Budapest Open Access Initiative, which has been signed by more than 47,000 individuals and 400 organisations to date.

The Berlin Declaration of Open Access Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities from 2003 is probably even better known. The nearly 250 organisations that have signed the Declaration also include the Finnish Council of University Rectors.

The EU-level petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results has been drafted in the same spirit as the initiatives mentioned above.

The goal now has been to take initiatives and petitions to a more practical level. In October 2007, twenty rectors from European universities met at the University of Liège to discuss how to make open online publication an established part of university operations in Europe. The meeting resulted in the EurOpenScholar project, which aims to inform researchers and universities about new information distribution channels and create permanent open publication repositories in universities.

Also part of the Open Access movement are all the various international and national projects that have contributed to the spread of open online publishing, for example, by developing infrastructure related to publication repositories and OA publishing or by creating online services that benefit those interested in open online publishing and/or researchers obliged to comply with it.

Open Access activities and projects have also been arranged in Finland. In April 2003, individual researchers, representatives of academic publishers and information specialists from research libraries set up the FinnOA working group, which aims to “promote open access to Finnish research results and make the open access model better known in scholarly publishing”.

The Finnish government is basically favourably disposed towards open online publishing, as seen in the memorandum by the Open Access working group from 2005.