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Preface
The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and
economic realities of distributing scientific knowledge and
cultural heritage. For the first time ever, the Internet now
offers the chance to constitute a global and interactive representation
of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the guarantee
of worldwide access.
We, the undersigned, feel obliged to address the challenges
of the Internet as an emerging functional medium for distributing
knowledge. Obviously, these developments will be able to significantly
modify the nature of scientific publishing as well as the
existing system of quality assurance.
In accordance with the spirit of the Declaration of the Budapest
Open Acess Initiative, the ECHO Charter and the Bethesda Statement
on Open Access Publishing, we have drafted the Berlin Declaration
to promote the Internet as a functional instrument for a global
scientific knowledge base and human reflection and to specify
measures which research policy makers, research institutions,
funding agencies, libraries, archives and museums need to
consider.
Goals
Our mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete
if the information is not made widely and readily available
to society. New possibilities of knowledge dissemination not
only through the classical form but also and increasingly
through the open access paradigm via the Internet have to
be supported. We define open access as a comprehensive source
of human knowledge and cultural heritage that has been approved
by the scientific community.
In order to realize the vision of a global and accessible
representation of knowledge, the future Web has to be sustainable,
interactive, and transparent. Content and software tools must
be openly accessible and compatible.
Definition of an Open Access Contribution
Establishing open access as a worthwhile procedure ideally
requires the active commitment of each and every individual
producer of scientific knowledge and holder of cultural heritage.
Open access contributions include original scientific research
results, raw data and metadata, source materials, digital
representations of pictorial and graphical materials and scholarly
multimedia material.
Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions:
- The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions
grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right
of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit
and display the work publicly and to make and distribute
derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible
purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community
standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement
of proper attribution and responsible use of the published
work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small
numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
- A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials,
including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an
appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and
thus published) in at least one online repository using
suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions)
that is supported and maintained by an academic institution,
scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established
organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted
distribution, inter operability, and long-term archiving.
Supporting the Transition to the Electronic Open Access
Paradigm
Our organizations are interested in the further promotion
of the new open access paradigm to gain the most benefit for
science and society. Therefore, we intend to make progress
by
- encouraging our researchers/grant recipients to publish
their work according to the principles of the open access
paradigm.
- encouraging the holders of cultural heritage to support
open access by providing their resources on the Internet.
- developing means and ways to evaluate open access contributions
and online-journals in order to maintain the standards of
quality assurance and good scientific practice.
- advocating that open access publication be recognized
in promotion and tenure evaluation.
- advocating the intrinsic merit of contributions to an
open access infrastructure by software tool development,
content provision, metadata creation, or the publication
of individual articles.
We realize that the process of moving to open access changes
the dissemination of knowledge with respect to legal and financial
aspects. Our organizations aim to find solutions that support
further development of the existing legal and financial frameworks
in order to facilitate optimal use and access.
Governments, universities, research institutions, funding
agencies, foundations, libraries, museums, archives, learned
societies and professional associations who share the vision
expressed in the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge
in the Sciences and Humanities are therefore invited to join
the signatories that have already signed the Declaration.
| Please contact: |
Prof. Dr. Peter Gruss
President of the Max Planck Society
Hofgartenstraße 8
D-80539 Munich
Germany
e-mail: praesident@gv.mpg.de |
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| last changed: 04.08.2009 |
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