Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
Wildhainweg 3
Postfach
CH-3001 Berne
Phone +41 31 308 22 22
E-mail oa@snf.ch
“OA initiatives started mainly as a reaction of scientific communities to the unsustainable and cost-increasing developments in scientific publishing. Over the last few decades, subscription costs have soared and profit-oriented publishing houses have played a dominant role in the publication and dissemination of scientific works. Their position is based on the fact that researchers appreciate their content, work for them as authors, reviewers and editors and often feel obliged to publish their works with them – all based on the current evaluation and reputation mechanisms – in order to maintain optimal career chances. As a consequence, most of the publicly funded research is locked behind a paywall.
All over the world, OA initiatives offer a chance of providing broad-based open access to research results, bringing research back to the scientists and to the public that funds it. They also represent an opportunity to point out flaws and consequences of the current evaluation and reputation mechanisms in science. Research funding organisations and academic institutions are supporting these initiatives by implementing the corresponding OA policies and by providing the necessary financial resources and infrastructure (e.g. repositories, OA Policies).”
Swiss National Strategy on Open Access, 31 January 2017 (PDF)
Open Access has been defined in a number of ways. The most widely-used definition stems from the Budapest Open Access Initiative:
The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment. Primarily, this category encompasses their peer-reviewed journal articles, but it also includes any unreviewed preprints that they might wish to put online for comment or to alert colleagues to important research findings. By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
Source: Budapest Open Access Initiative
Other definitions relating to OA:
Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
Wildhainweg 3
Postfach
CH-3001 Berne
Phone +41 31 308 22 22
E-mail oa@snf.ch