Re: when did the Open Access movement "officially" begin

From: Peter Suber <peters_at_EARLHAM.EDU>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:48:07 -0400

At 09:21 AM 6/26/2007, you wrote:
>I have a question: when did the OA movement "officially" begin - the
>earliest dates I have are:
>
>2001 - editors/authors decide to boycott journals that do not make content
>OA within 6 months
>2002 - Budapest Open Access Initiative
>2003 - Berlin declaration, Bethesda statement, etc., etc.
>
>so would it be correct to say that the OA movement started in 2000/2001 ?


Dear Pippa,

The OA movement has no "official" beginning, if only because there's no
central organization to give "official" recognition to any particular
milestone.

Unofficially, however, if you want to identify the influential events that
did the most to catalyze the movement, you've picked four good ones: the
PLoS public letter and the declarations from Budapest, Bethesda, and
Berlin. But there are many more as well, including many earlier ones, such
as Paul Ginsparg's launch of arXiv in 1991 and Stevan Harnad's
self-archiving proposal in 1994. For my take on the landmark events in the
evolution of the movement, see my timeline,
<http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm>.

      Peter


Peter Suber
Senior Researcher, SPARC
Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge
Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College
Author, SPARC Open Access Newsletter
Author, Open Access News blog
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/
peter.suber_at_earlham.edu
Received on Wed Jun 27 2007 - 00:03:32 BST

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