Thirty-three research institutions, associations, and foundations in the US, Canada, and Mexico recently signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. These private, public, and non-profit organisations join nearly 300 more from around the world in another clear sign of the growing demand for change in the way scientific and scholarly research results are communicated and maximised. The announcement is made in conjunction with the ninth Berlin conference, at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The Berlin Declaration promotes the Internet as a medium for disseminating global knowledge. Its goal is to make scientific and scholarly research more accessible to the broader public by taking full advantage of the possibilities offered by digital electronic communication. Signatories support actions that ensure the future Web is sustainable, interactive, and transparent - and that content is openly accessible - in order to realise the vision of a global and accessible representation of knowledge. The leaders of research institutions, libraries, archives, museums, funding agencies, and governments from around the world have signed the Declaration - including CERN, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Academia Europaea, and the German Max Planck Society (co-initiator and custodian).
North American signatories now include leading private research institutions (such as Harvard University and Duke University), public research institutions (University of Kansas, University of California-Los Angeles), Canadian research campuses (Concordia University, University of Quebec in Montreal), smaller academic institutions (Oberlin College, Grand Valley State University), non-profit organisations (Alliance for Information Science and Technology Innovation, Science Commons), major library coalitions (SPARC, the Association of Research Libraries, Canadian Library Association), and the Open Society Foundations (architect of the Budapest Open Access Initiative). The full list is available at http://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/berlin-prozess/signatoren.
The Berlin 9 Conference is organised by representatives from the science, humanities, research, funding and policy communities, including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Marine Biological Laboratory, the Max Planck Society, Association of Research Libraries, and SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition).
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