Scholarly Communications: Declarations and Statements of Principles

Arising out of a 2001 conference hosted by the Open Society Institute, this statement of principles was released on February 14, 2002, and is the first of three pathbreaking declarations signed by organizations like SPARC, BioMed Central, and the Public Library of Science.

Drafted during a meeting at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, on April 11, 2003, this statement defines open access and explains the rationale of its advocates. It was signed by representatives from organizations including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Public Library of Science, SPARC, and Harvard Medical School.

The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was drafted in October 2003 at a conference hosted by the Max Planck Society. It is one of the milestones of the Open Access movement.

Adopted in Paris on 30 January 2004 and signed by 34 nations, this declaration was initiated by the OECD Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy.

This statement of principles was composed at the International Seminar on Open Access for Developing Countries held in Brazil in 2005 and convened by the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization, and the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information.

Composed at an international conference hosted by the Carter Center at Emory University and signed by representatives from 40 countries, this document declares that, "Access to information is a fundamental human right."

Written in 2008 by Aaron Swartz, a young leader of the Open Access Movement who, was arrested by MIT and prosecuted by the federal government for illegally downloading scholarly content from JSTOR. Aaron took his own life as a result of the prosecution and the story of his life and advocacy work was recounted in the 2014 documentary, The Internet's Own Boy.

Written by the European Commission and the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities, the statement cites the 2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access in its calls for "more efficient data-sharing and more open access to information."