Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Happy Birthday - and Valentine's Day - to BOAI!

Today is the 5th anniversary of what many of us see as the first major, international defining moment of the open access movement - the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

And, what a birthday it is! The European Union Petition for Guaranteed Public Access to Publicly-Funded Research Results now has more than 20,000 signatories, including more than 1,000 institutional signatories; a new study just released shows that 85% of European researchers support the EU open access mandate; in Brussells, Ministers & Rectors have signed the Berlin Declaration; and tomorrow, in the U.S., is a student-led National Day of Action on Open Access.

While much of the action this week is in Europe and the U.S., Canada can be proud of its role in the beginnings of the open access movement. Of the 16 people at that meeting in Budapest, 3 were Canadian, world leaders in open access all: Leslie Chan, Jean-Claude Guédon, and Stevan Harnad, as previously discussed in the first post in my series, Canadian Leadership in the Open Access Movement: Budapest.

Thanks to Peter Suber for a very modest alert about BOAI (he was one of the drafters of the statement). For more details on recent events, see Open Access News.

This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.

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