Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), Open Society Institute (now Open Society Foundations -OSF)

What is this about?

The Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), produced by the Open Society Institute (now Open Society Foundations), is a foundational international framework promoting open access to research outputs. It establishes openness as the default while balancing ethics, privacy, intellectual property, and security, linking open access to research quality, reproducibility, and equitable knowledge sharing. It encourages depositing publications in trusted repositories, using Creative Commons licensing, persistent identifiers, and FAIR-aligned data management. Responsibilities span researchers, institutions, funders, and publishers, with clear guidance on planning for openness, rights retention, acknowledging funding, and using infrastructure efficiently. Limited embargoes or exceptions for sensitive data must be justified transparently. The initiative emphasizes equity, zero-embargo access, and publisher-agnostic routes while prioritizing the quality of openness metadata, interoperability, and reproducibility over publication counts. By consolidating dispersed principles into a coherent framework, it provides a practical reference for implementing global open science standards and fostering transparent, inclusive, and accessible research worldwide.

For whom is this important?

All stakeholders in research

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