BOAI

BOAI refers to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, a landmark declaration adopted in Budapest, Hungary, in 2002. Its primary goal was to promote open access to scholarly research. The initiative defined open access as the free, immediate, online availability of research articles, coupled with the rights to reuse these articles fully. This means that readers can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles.

The BOAI was a crucial early articulation of the open access movement, which advocates for the unrestricted availability of academic and scientific research. It proposed two main pathways for achieving open access. The first is through "self-archiving," where authors deposit their accepted manuscripts into an open digital repository. The second is through "open access journals," which publish articles under an open access license, making them freely available to everyone.

The initiative was supported by a group of prominent scientists and organizations who convened to discuss how to make research literature more accessible. The core principle was that the internet represented a transformative technology that could democratize knowledge and accelerate scientific progress by removing economic and legal barriers to access. The BOAI continues to be a foundational document for the global open access movement, influencing policy and practice in academic publishing and research institutions worldwide.