Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), promoted by the Open Society Institute
"The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution 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 foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge"
Declaration of Berlin (2003), promoted by attendees at the Conference on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities
"Our mission to spread knowledge is incomplete if the information has not been made widely and readily available to society. It is necessary to support new possibilities of spreading knowledge, not just via traditional channels but increasingly through the paradigm of open access via the Internet. Let's define open access as an extended source of human knowledge and cultural heritage that has been validated by the scientific community"
Declaration of Messina (2004), promoted by CRUI in support of open access to academic literature. The declaration was signed by 74 Italian universities, including Politecnico di Milano:
"... they declare to adhere to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in support of open access to scientific literature, with the hope that this gesture will constitute an initial, important contribution by Italian universities to a broader, more rapid diffusion of scientific knowledge"
Budapest Open Access Initiative, after 10 years (2012):
"Every institution of higher education should have a policy assuring that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles by faculty members are deposited in the institution's designated repository. Every research funding agency, public or private, should have a policy assuring that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles reporting funded research are deposited in a suitable repository and made OA as soon as practicable. Universities with institutional repositories should require deposit in the repository for all research articles to be considered for promotion, tenure, or other forms of internal assessment and review"
Position statement on open access in Public Research Bodies and the CRUI (March 2013):
"...CRUI and Italian Public Research Bodies, aware of the benefits of open access for national research, in terms of visibility, promotion and internationalisation, undertake to carry out coordinated activities for the success of open access".
Signatory public bodies are: EPR - CNR, ENEA, INGV, INFN, ISS ( CRA body from 2 May 2013).
An excellent overview of Open Access has been written by Peter Suber from Harvard University
- in a document available using the link http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
- in a book entitled Open Access published in 2012
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/hoap/Open_Access_(the_book)