Brief History
The ideas behind Open Access have been germinating for some time. Interest in Open Access coalesced throughout the 1990s, and culminated with the 2001 conference on “Free Online Scholarship" by the Open Society Institute in Budapest. The result of this conference was the release of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). The BOAI is recognized as the foundational document of the Open Access movement. You can read the original declaration in full here: BOAI. In essence, the BOAI was the first initiative to use the term “Open Access." Their definition influenced how OA advocates pushed the movement forward. It read:
By “open access" to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
In addition, the BOAI identified certain self-archiving standards that are used by search engines and other tools to index self-archived material.
Brief Timeline
- Project Gutenberg — 1971: Freely available public domain texts.
- arXivorg — 1991: High-energy physics preprint server out of Cornell University Libraries. Approximately 4 million downloads per month.
- Public Knowledge Project — 1998: Developed Open Journal Systems, an open-source journal production and hosting content management system.
- BioMed Central — 2000: OA APC funded publisher.
- Creative Commons Licenses — 2001: Licenses created by Lawrence Lessig and Aaron Swartz
- Budapest Open Access Initiative — 2002: Conference sponsored by the Open Society Institute. Laid the foundation for the OA movement.
- Public Library of Science (PLoS) — 2003: OA APC funded publisher.
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) — 2003
- Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) — 2008: Trade association including commercial, society and non-profit publishers.
- Confederation of Open Access Repositories — 2005-09
- SciHub — 2011: Pirate library providing access to millions of paywalled articles.
As Tennant et al. explain, a result of the BOAI and the OA movement in general is the rise of OA-only publishers. These publishers focus exclusively on borne-digital material and have developed a sustainable business model for it. Examples of such publishers include PLOS, BioMed Central, PeerJ and F1000Research. Ultimately, these new platforms are attempting to institute new, sustainable business models that undermine the control currently held by traditional scholarly publishers.
Tennant, Jonathan P, et al. (2016). The Academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review. F1000Research, 5(632), 4-23. (doi:10.12688/f1000research.8460.3)
Royster, Paul. (2016). A brief history of open access. Presentation for Academic Activities Series, Love Library, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, March 15, 2016. Available here.