NIH Public Access Policy and My NCBI: Open Access

The Budapest Open Access Initiative uses the term "open access" to refer to materials that are free and that are available, without restriction, on the web. The initiative identifies the great promise of historic development and encourages international support for open access publishing.:

"An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradtion is the willingess of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the Internet, The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic disstricution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundationfor uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quiest for knowledge."

From the Budapest Open Access Initiative

Budapest Hungary, 2002