LONDON — The campaign to provide free access to scientific research has been given fresh impetus by a $3 million grant from the Open Society Institute, an organization set up by financier and philanthropist George Soros to promote greater openness in society. The money is intended to finance initiatives to make research freely available to scientists around the world, free of the financial constraints of journal subscriptions.
The funds have been provided through the establishment of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), a new attempt to break the traditional model of research publishing. The initiative — announced on 14 February 2002 — outlines a set of principles and strategies for online publication and storage of research findings. Backed by a growing number of supporters of open access, the initiative calls for two complementary strategies.
The first is a system of self-archiving, where researchers deposit their articles, or preprints, in open ...
