---
title: "Open science"
chunk: 4/8
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:48:21.258734+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Internet and the free access to scientific documents ===
The open science movement, as presented in activist and institutional discourses at the beginning of the 21st century, refers to different ways of opening up science, especially in the Internet age. Its first pillar is free access to scientific publications. This issue entered the political landscape when the Budapest Open Access Initiative was released February 14, 2002, following a conference organized by the Open Society Institute (now Open Society Foundations) on December 1–2, 2001. The resulting declaration calls for the use of digital tools such as open archives and open access journals, free of charge for the reader.
The idea of open access to scientific publications quickly became inseparable from the question of free licenses to guarantee the right to disseminate and possibly modify shared documents, such as the Creative Commons licenses, created in 2002. In 2011, a new text from the Budapest Open Initiative explicitly refers to the relevance of the CC-BY license to guarantee free dissemination and not only free access to a scientific document.
Beyond publications, the open access principle has expanded to include research data — the empirical foundation of scientific studies across disciplines, as mentioned already in the Berlin Declaration in 2003. In 2007, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published a report on access to publicly funded research data, in which it defined it as the data that validates research results.
Beyond its democratic virtues, open science aims to respond to the replication crisis of research results, notably through the generalization of the opening of data or source code used to produce them or through the dissemination of methodological articles.
The open science movement inspired several regulatory and legislative measures. Thus, in 2007, the University of Liège adopted a mandate requiring deposit of researchers' publications in its institutional repository, Orbi, which launched in November 2008. In 2008, through the Consolidated Appropriations Act, the NIH Public Access Policy was made mandatory (previously voluntary since 2004). In France, the law for a digital Republic enacted in 2016 creates the right to deposit the validated manuscript of a scientific article in an open archive, with an embargo period following the date of publication in the journal. The law also creates the principle of reuse of public data by default.

== Politics ==
In many countries, governments fund some science research. Scientists often publish the results of their research by writing articles and donating them to be published in scholarly journals, which frequently are commercial. Public entities such as universities and libraries subscribe to these journals. Michael Eisen, a founder of the Public Library of Science, has described this system by saying that "taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results."
In December 2011, some United States legislators introduced a bill called the Research Works Act, which would prohibit federal agencies from issuing grants with any provision requiring that articles reporting on taxpayer-funded research be published for free to the public online. Darrell Issa, a co-sponsor of the bill, explained the bill by saying that "Publicly funded research is and must continue to be absolutely available to the public. We must also protect the value added to publicly funded research by the private sector and ensure that there is still an active commercial and non-profit research community." In response, researchers organized widespread protests, including a boycott of the commercial publisher Elsevier called The Cost of Knowledge.
The Dutch Presidency of the Council of the European Union called out for action in April 2016 to migrate European Commission funded research to Open Science. European Commissioner Carlos Moedas introduced the Open Science Cloud at the Open Science Conference in Amsterdam on 4–5 April. During this meeting also The Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science was presented, a living document outlining concrete actions for the European Community to move to Open Science. The European Commission continues to be committed to an Open Science policy including developing a repository for research digital objects, European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and metrics for evaluating quality and impact.
In October 2021, the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation released an official translation of its second plan for open science spanning the years 2021–2024.
Two UN frameworks set out some common global standards for concepts either closerely related to or subsumed under Open Science: the UNESCO Recommendation on Science and Scientific Researchers, approved by the General Conference at its 39th session in 2017, and the UNESCO Strategy on Open Access to scientific information and research, approved by the General Conference at its 36th session in 2011. In November 2019, UNESCO was tasked by its 193 Member States, during their 40th General Conference, with leading a global dialogue on Open Science to identify globally-agreed norms and create a compregensive framework. In a multistakeholder, consultative, inclusive and participatory process, the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science was developed, which was adopted by Member States in 2021.