Definition of Budapest compliant open access

Bethesda and Berlin Declarations on Open Access

In 2003 two other statements were published on open access publishing. The Bethesda Statement and the Berlin Declaration are both very similar to the Budapest definition. This the reason that these definitions for open access are  often referred to as BBB Open Access. After the original Berlin Congress in 2003, yearly Berlin conferences have been held in different countries of Europe. The first Berlin Conference outside Europe was Berlin8 in Beijing. Berlin9 took place in Washington DC in november 2011. All the Berlin conferences have been focussing on practical implications and strategies for open access. The Berlin4 conference for example focused on open access to raw scientific data in the interest of transparency in scientific research. The material of all Berlin conferences taken together forms a treasure trove for open access related subjects.

Creative Commons

Many publications are published using the Creative Commons non-commercial variant of licencing (CC-NC) which essentially means that works can be accessed and read freely and nothing more. Reuse and redistribution as mentioned in the BOAI definition are explicitly forbidden. The CC-BY licence is the closest to the BOAI definition. A third variant CC-BY-SA has some more restrictions. The original meaning of Open Access (OA) has become even more clouded by the distinction between Green OA (articles in repositories), Gold OA (articles in journals), gratis OA (reader pays nothing) and libre OA (gratis with one or more barriers lifted). All combinations of these flavours are possible.*

Open Data

For a definition of Open Data in science we refer to the Panton principles for open data in science, a set of rules for the open access publication of data and data sets. The principles contain a STRONG recommendation that data, especially where publicly funded, be explicitly placed in the public domain via the use of the Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) or Creative Commons Zero Waiver (CC-0).

*For more information see Michael Nielsen excellent introduction to OA, orfor a description of different forms of open access see Peter Suber’s article on  gratis and libre OA and also ‘The rise of libre open access“ in a recent SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN). Information on Creative Commons licences can be found on their website.

**The text on page 1 was partly reproduced from Cameron Neylon’s  blog on the 10th anniversary of the Budapest Declaration