 What is the role of Budapest in open access generally?
What Is Open Access? Shifting from ink on paper to digital text suddenly allows us to make perfect copies of our work. Shifting from isolated computers to a globe-spanning network of connected computers suddenly allows us to share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost. Digital technologies have created more than one revolution. Open access is the name of the revolutionary kind of access these authors, unencumbered by a motive of financial gain, are free to provide to their readers. Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. We could call it “barrier-free” access, but that would emphasize the negative rather than the positive. In any case, we can be more specific about which access barriers OA removes. A price tag is a significant access barrier. The resulting access gaps harm authors by limiting their audience and impact, harm readers by limiting what they can retrieve and read, and thereby harm research from both directions. OA removes price barriers. Copyright can also be a significant access barrier. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. Removing price barriers means that readers are not limited by their own ability to pay, or by the budgets of the institutions where they may have library privileges. These purposes include reading and searching, but also redistributing, translating, text mining, migrating to new media, long-term archiving, and innumerable new forms of research, analysis, and processing we haven’t yet imagined. OA makes work more useful in both ways, by making it available to more people who can put it to use, and by freeing those people to use and reuse it. When we need to, we can be more specific about access vehicles and access barriers. While every kind of OA removes price barriers, there are many different permission barriers we could remove if we wanted to. If we remove price barriers alone, we provide gratis OA , and if we remove at least some permission barriers as well, we provide libre OA . OA was defined in three influential public statements: the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003), and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (October 2003). Here’s how the Budapest statement defined OA: There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to [research] literature.
 It happens to be one city that hosted an early meeting about these issues
 Most of the scholars in this city tend to publish in OA journals, which means they have pull on the policies  It happens to be one city that hosted an early meeting about these issues  It is the location of the headquarters of the company that oversees OA publishing  Most of the decisions about OA policies are made in meetings hosted there