Open Access: Toward the Internet of the Mind

Jean-Claude Guédon

Introduction

On February 14, 2002, a small text of fewer than a thousand words quietly appeared on the Web: titled the “Budapest Open Access Initiative” (BOAI), it gave a public face to discussions between sixteen participants that had taken place on December 1 and 2, 2001 in Budapest, at the invitation of the Open Society Foundations (then known as the Open Society Institute).

Actually, the Budapest meeting was the seat of impassioned (and often divergent) analyses and critiques of various dysfunctional aspects of scientific communication: the slowness of the editorial process, the high price of journals, and the failure to take advantage of the Internet were all cited as obstacles to the deployment of an optimal communication system for scholarly research. At the end of the day, however, as no agreement had emerged, the idea of crafting a position paper, a kind of manifesto, emerged: it was felt that the very effort needed to make such a result possible would help cement the small group that had been convened in Hungary, and help it to move forward - despite initial differences.

Thanks to the miracles of Internet communication, creating a position paper worked. Convergence was achieved in the form of the document that emerged on Valentines Day 2002. In fact, the virtual conversation among the participants had brought forth an energy and an enthusiasm that quickly transmuted a term – Open Access – into a movement. It must be added that the textual crafting of the BOAI was masterfully conducted by Peter Suber, who also lent his felicitous writing style to the document. It started with a beautiful and ringing statement that conferred a form of historical necessity to Open Access:

“An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good.”

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Continua qui: http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/open-access-toward-the-internet-of-the-mind