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Keywords Archives, Journal publishing, Research
A new initiative to help provide free access to refereed articles on the Internet has received US$3 million in funding from financier and philanthropist George Soros' Open Society Institute (OSI). Launched on 14 February 2002, the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) will help scholars self-archive their refereed journal articles online and assist in the establishment of alternative journals that are committed to offering free and unrestricted online access to published articles.
To be useful, research must be used. To be used (read, cited, applied, extended), it must be accessible. There are currently 20,000 peer-reviewed journals of scientific and scholarly research world-wide, publishing over 4 million articles per year, every single one of them given away for free by its researcher, authors and their research institutions, with the sole goal of maximising their uptake and usage by further researchers and hence their...