What is Open Access?
Open access (OA) refers to a publishing and distribution model for scholarly communication that makes research information available to readers online at no cost, rather than the traditional model of charging readers for access.
A key motivation for the development of the OA concept was that scholarly literature should be publicly available on the Internet free of charge, so that anyone interested can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, link to, and use full texts in any other conceivable legal way, without encountering financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those associated with Internet access itself.
The Max Planck Society is one of the founders of the international Open Access movement. The publication of the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" on October 22, 2003 and the subsequent annual conferences initiated a process that has raised awareness of the issue of access to scientific information. 2023 thus marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of the Berlin Declaration.
20th anniversary of the Berlin Declaration
With the 16th Berlin Open Access Conference, organized by the OA2020 Initiative and hosted by the Max Planck Society, participants will return to the setting where the Berlin Declaration originated. There, they will refine and renew our approaches to achieving the vision for an open information environment in the service of science and society, with a particular focus on transformative agreements.
