The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has signed the Berlin Declaration on "Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" to help break down hurdles for accessing scientific knowledge. The basic idea of open access (OA) publishing is that the results of research financed by the public also should be freely available to the public.
The declaration, launched in 2003, is the response from the research system to the information-sharing opportunities offered by the Internet. It became the starting point for a widespread movement aiming to increase the accessibility of scientific results and the drafting of the Berlin Declaration.
By using the Internet, scientific articles can be freely distributed for downloading, reading and citation. The basic requirements are that the articles are correctly cited and that the material is not distorted in any way. With OA, institutions with scarce resources, particularly in developing countries, get access to high quality scientific work that thereby can stimulate their own research. Since traditional scientific publishing is far more expensive than OA publishing, the aim is that resources that are spent on costly subscriptions instead will be redirected to research.
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