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Re: [ox-en] Berlin Declaration on Open Access



Hi Thomas,

Do you know anything about this yourself? Looking at the list
of signatories, the first one I see is Hans-Jörg Bullinger, head
of the Fraunhofer Institute, who have many patents on MPEG - the reason
the Ogg implementations were started, since free implementations of
MPEG were impossible. 

Am I being too cynical? 

Also, do you have any idea what they mean by the last sentence:

We realize that the process of moving to open access changes the
dissemination of knowledge with respect to legal and financial aspects.  
Our organizations aim to find solutions that support further development
of the existing legal and financial frameworks in order to facilitate
optimal use and access.

(I tried to download some of their PDFs to find out more but the PDFs are 
huge, and I keep getting timeouts before completion)

Or why none of the British attenders signed the document? :-(

Graham

On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Thomas Berker wrote:

This one was signed by pretty high-ranking German research bureaucrats, in 
fact from the highest rank.

Best, Thomas B

------------
<http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html>

Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and 
Humanities

Preface
The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities 
of distributing scientific knowledge and cultural heritage. For the first 
time ever, the Internet now offers the chance to constitute a global and 
interactive representation of human knowledge, including cultural heritage 
and the guarantee of worldwide access.
We, the undersigned, feel obliged to address the challenges of the Internet 
as an emerging functional medium for distributing knowledge. Obviously, 
these developments will be able to significantly modify the nature of 
scientific publishing as well as the existing system of quality assurance.
In accordance with the spirit of the Declaration of the Budapest Open Acess 
Initiative, the ECHO Charter and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access 
Publishing, we have drafted the Berlin Declaration to promote the Internet 
as a functional instrument for a global scientific knowledge base and human 
reflection and to specify measures which research policy makers, research 
institutions, funding agencies, libraries, archives and museums need to 
consider.

Goals
Our mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete if the 
information is not made widely and readily available to society. New 
possibilities of knowledge dissemination not only through the classical 
form but also and increasingly through the open access paradigm via the 
Internet have to be supported. We define open access as a comprehensive 
source of human knowledge and cultural heritage that has been approved by 
the scientific community.
In order to realize the vision of a global and accessible representation of 
knowledge, the future Web has to be sustainable, interactive, and 
transparent. Content and software tools must be openly accessible and 
compatible.

Definition of an Open Access Contribution
Establishing open access as a worthwhile procedure ideally requires the 
active commitment of each and every individual producer of scientific 
knowledge and holder of cultural heritage. Open access contributions 
include original scientific research results, raw data and metadata, source 
materials, digital representations of pictorial and graphical materials and 
scholarly multimedia material.

Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions:
   1. The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to 
all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license 
to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to 
make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any 
responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community 
standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper 
attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as 
well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their 
personal use.
   2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, 
including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate 
standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least 
one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open 
Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic 
institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other 
well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, 
unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and long-term archiving.

Supporting the Transition to the Electronic Open Access Paradigm
Our organizations are interested in the further promotion of the new open 
access paradigm to gain the most benefit for science and society. 
Therefore, we intend to make progress by
    * encouraging our researchers/grant recipients to publish their work 
according to the principles of the open access paradigm.
    * encouraging the holders of cultural heritage to support open access 
by providing their resources on the Internet.
    * developing means and ways to evaluate open access contributions and 
online-journals in order to maintain the standards of quality assurance and 
good scientific practice.
    * advocating that open access publication be recognized in promotion 
and tenure evaluation.
    * advocating the intrinsic merit of contributions to an open access 
infrastructure by software tool development, content provision, metadata 
creation, or the publication of individual articles.
We realize that the process of moving to open access changes the 
dissemination of knowledge with respect to legal and financial aspects. Our 
organizations aim to find solutions that support further development of the 
existing legal and financial frameworks in order to facilitate optimal use 
and access. 
_______________________
http://www.oekonux.org/


_______________________
http://www.oekonux.org/



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