OSI and eIFL'S Work to Promote Open Access to Scholarly Communications

Abstract

The Open Society Institute's Open Access (OA) Project is built upon the principles outlined in the Budapest Open Access Initiative which recommends complementary strategies: development of institutional repositories and open access journals. OSI provided funds for creation of directories of the repositories and journals, as well as funds for creating of the eIFL Open Access Program for transition and developing countries. Within the Program many open access workshops and conferences were organized in the year of 2005 worldwide. Following the OA workshop organized in November 2003 in Serbia, the KoBSON and the eIFL OA Program organized an Open Access Citation Indexes Seminar in Belgrade in November, 2005. The eIFL OA Program participated in Salvador, Brazil in the International Conference on Open Access in Developing Countries in September, 2005. The participants drafted the Salvador Declaration on Open Access which is the first declаration to state clearly how OA can benefit transition and developing countries.