Budapest Open Access Initiative

The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) emerged from a small meeting in Budapest on December 1-2, 2001 organized by the Open Society Institute (now Open Society Foundations), George Soros's philanthropy. The public declaration was released on February 14, 2002 and was signed by sixteen original advocates including Peter Suber, Stevan Harnad, Michael Eisen, and Jan Velterop. The Open Society Institute backed the initiative with an initial US$3 million grant. BOAI offered one of the earliest widely cited definitions of Open Access: literature that is freely available on the public internet so that anyone may read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to full texts without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from internet access itself. Authors retain control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged. The declaration named two complementary strategies. The first was author self-archiving in repositories conforming to Open Archives Initiative standards, later known as the Green Open Access route. The second was launching a new generation of OA journals, or converting existing subscription journals, later known as the Gold Open Access route. BOAI also introduced the influential distinction between 'gratis OA' (free to read) and 'libre OA' (free to read with explicit reuse rights, typically via a Creative Commons license). BOAI is recognized alongside the Bethesda Statement and the Berlin Declaration, both of 2003, as one of the three foundational 'BBB' definitions of open access. Anniversary updates in 2012 and 2022 (BOAI10 and BOAI20) renewed and expanded the recommendations. By 2023, more than 6,800 individuals and 1,600 organizations had signed the public version.