Signature of Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

by the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI)

17 November 2010, Geneva

Scholarly publishing is changing, and the European development research community needs to respond to the new trends in the publishing industry.

Over the last decade the rapid growth of communication technology and e-publishing has led to resources being increasingly available on the Internet as well as in traditional print form.

Open Access – making research knowledge freely available under license, usually via the Internet – presents opportunities for the use and dissemination of development research in particular for those with least access at present.

The potential of Open Access has encouraged funders, authors, publishers and librarians to examine new approaches.

While areas of dispute still exist, -- such as the business model and quality control -- it seems there is willingness among all the stakeholders to explore the advantages, and to tackle the disadvantages, of Open Access in a spirit of collaboration.

Open Access publications achieve a high standard of general access and availability. It has been proven¹ that OA publications are more frequently read than publications with limited access (‘‘OA Impact Advantage’’). This means that scientists themselves and their achievements will receive a higher degree of publicity.

EADI Declaration on Open Access

We – the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI) -- believe that the interest of the international development community in general and the European development research community in particular will be best served by the adoption of Open Access principles for scientific and research literature.

We commit ourselves

by joining the Berlin Declaration of Open Access today

to promoting free and full access to scholarly information by

Encouraging our members to join (if not already signatories) the 286 international academic and other bodies as signatories to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities
Encouraging our members to create institutional Open Access repositories in line with international standards and in co-operation with the relevant national archives and to explore possibilities to link the repositories
Encouraging our publishers to practise models of Open Access, such as making final versions of published papers freely available online on a regular journal platform.
Reviewing relevant intellectual property, staff evaluation and funding policies and practices in order to:
- encourage EADI members, where practical mandate, to deposit copies of their outputs (articles, reports, conference papers, etc) in Open Access repositories
- encourage and support EADI members to publish in Open Access journals and publications
Promoting the use and creation of peer reviewed Open Access journals in their relevant fields of study
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 and to promote their recognition
Supporting the EADI Information Management Working Group (IMWG) in pursuing their activities with regard to awareness raising on Open Access issues and with regard to developing open access infrastructures for EADI members.

¹Gargouri Y, Hajjem C, Larivière V, Gingras Y, Carr L, et al. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLoS ONE 5(10): e13636. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013636