The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences supports free access to scientific results

The Academy has signed the Berlin Declaration on “Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities”. The basic idea of Open Access Publishing is that the results of research financed by the public also should be freely available to the public.

By using the Internet, scientific articles can be freely distributed for downloading, reading and citation. The basic requirements are that the articles are correctly cited and that the material is not distorted in any way. Thanks to Open Access, institutions with scarce resources, not least in developing countries, get access to high quality scientific work that thereby can stimulate their own research. Since traditional scientific publishing is far more expensive than Open Access Publishing, the wish is that resources that are spent on costly subscriptions today instead will be redirected to research.

In 2003 the conference “Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities” was held in Berlin. It became the starting point for a widespread movement aiming to increase the accessibility of scientific results and the drafting of the Berlin Declaration.