Institutions in Ghana, Serbia and Uganda sign the Berlin Declaration

Three more EIFL partner institutions – Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (Ghana), University of Belgrade (Serbia) and Makerere University (Uganda) – joined over 340 leading international research, scientific, and cultural institutions from around the world that have signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and the Humanities.

The Declaration builds on the significant progress of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, calling for open access to knowledge in the humanities as well as in the sciences. It also moves beyond the scope of primary literature, indicating, “open access contributions include original scientific research results, raw data and metadata, source materials, digital representations of pictorial and graphical materials and scholarly multimedia material.”

Signatories commit to the principle of open access movement, which include the following:

• To encourage researchers to make their materials available in open access (through self-archiving in open access repositories or publishing in open access journals);

• To encourage the holders of cultural heritage to support open access by providing their resources on the internet;

• To develop means and ways to evaluate open access contributions to maintain the standards of quality assurance and good scientific practice;

• To advocate that open access publications be recognized in promotion and tenure evaluation;

• To advocate the intrinsic merit of contributions to an open access infrastructure by software tool development, content provision, metadata creation, or the publication of individual articles.

• To pursuing solutions that advance the internet “as an emerging functional medium for distributing knowledge.”

We encourage institutions from EIFL partner countries to sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and the Humanities. See more information about EIFL partner institutions that have signed the Berlin Declaration this year here.

Pro: Signing the Berlin Declaration offers an institution a unique chance to profile itself as a progressive institution that is visible to the outside world and which recognises and adds value to research output.

How to sign the Declaration

To add your institution to the list of signatories please follow these instructions:

1. Ask your highest representative to write a letter or an e-mail to the President of the Max Planck Society, Prof. Peter Gruss, Hofgartenstrasse 8, 80539 Munich, Germany, (e-mail: praesident[@]gv.mpg.de with copy to open-access[@]mpdl.mpg.de) in which he/she declares his/her interest in joining the signatories that have already signed the Declaration.

2. The letter/mail should precisely contain all the data of your organization to be included in the list of signatories as well as the date of signature (which could also be in the past). Necessary data:

• Sign Date:
• Organization:
• Organization type:
• Abbreviation:
• Person:
• Position:
• City:
• Country:
• Continent:

3. To organise the cooperation between the organisations which have signed the Berlin Declaration someone in your organisation should act as a contact person at the working level.

Background and talking points for your use in advancing these conversations are available online.