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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| History of open access | 1/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_open_access | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T10:14:35.524738+00:00 | kb-cron |
The history of open access can be traced back to at least the 1950's, with an explosion of interest following the advent of the internet. The idea and practise of providing free online access to journal articles began at least a decade before the term "open access" was formally coined. Computer scientists had been self-archiving in anonymous ftp archives since the 1970s and physicists had been self-archiving in arXiv since the 1990s. The Subversive Proposal to generalize the practice was posted in 1994. The term "open access" itself was first formulated in three public statements in the 2000s: the Budapest Open Access Initiative in February 2002, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing in June 2003, and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in October 2003, and the initial concept of open access refers to an unrestricted online access to scholarly research primarily intended for scholarly journal articles.
== Efforts before the Internet ==
One early proponent of the publisher-pays model was the physicist Leó Szilárd. To help stem the flood of low-quality publications, he jokingly suggested in the 1940s that at the beginning of his career each scientist should be issued with 100 vouchers to pay for his papers. Closer to the present, but still ahead of its time, was Common Knowledge. This was an attempt to share information for the good of all, the brainchild of Brower Murphy, formerly of The Library Corporation. Both Brower and Common Knowledge are recognised in the Library Microcomputer Hall of Fame. One of Mahatma Gandhi's earliest publications, Hind Swaraj published in Gujarati in 1909 is recognised as the intellectual blueprint of India's freedom movement. The book was translated into English the next year, with a copyright legend that read "No Rights Reserved". The modern open-access movement (as a social movement) traces its history at least back to the 1950s, with the Letterist International (LI) placing anything in their journal Potlatch in the public domain. As the LI merged to form the Situationist International, Guy Debord wrote to Patrick Straram "All the material published by the Situationist International is, in principle, usable by everyone, even without acknowledgement, without the preoccupations of literary property." This was to facilitate détournement. It became much more prominent in the 1990s with the advent of the Digital Age. With the spread of the Internet and the ability to copy and distribute electronic data at no cost, the arguments for open access gained new importance.