Not-for-profit organisation Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) has announced that three more EIFL partner institutions have signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and the Humanities. The institutions are: Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (Ghana), University of Belgrade (Serbia) and Makerere University (Uganda). These institutions join over 340 leading international research, scientific, and cultural institutions from around the world that have signed the Declaration.
The Declaration builds on the significant progress of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, calling for open access to knowledge in the humanities as well as in the sciences. It also moves beyond the scope of primary literature, indicating, 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.
By signing the declaration, the institutions will, in future, encourage researchers to make their materials available in open access (through self-archiving in open access repositories or publishing in open access journals). They will also encourage the holders of cultural heritage to support open access by providing their resources on the internet. The signatories commit: to develop means and ways to evaluate open access contributions to maintain the standards of quality assurance and good scientific practice; to advocate that open access publications be recognized in promotion and tenure evaluation; to advocate the intrinsic merit of contributions to an open access infrastructure by software tool development, content provision, metadata creation, or the publication of individual articles; and to pursue solutions that advance the internet 'as an emerging functional medium for distributing knowledge.'
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