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 development of the internet, by concerns about the increasing cost of subscriptions to journals, and also the growth of the view that the results of publicly-funded research should be in the public domain. In that context, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) was launched in 1998 by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) in North America in 1998, with a mission to correct what it saw as imbalances in the research communications system that had driven up the cost of journals and thereby inhibited access to information and thus the advancement of scholarship.

3.34. The open access movement began to take off in a significant way in the years immediately after 2000, with the launch of what are still the two biggest open access publishers, BioMedCentral in the UK, and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) in the US. Three key statements on open access were launched in 2002 and 2003: the Budapest Open Access Initiative at a meeting organised by the Open Society Institute in February 2002; the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, drafted at a meeting organised by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in April 2003; and the Berlin Declaration at a meeting organised by the Max Planck Society in October 2003. All three stress that open access implies that authors should grant free access and rights to use published works, subject only to proper attribution of authorship. Each also acknowledges two complementary routes to open access—publishing in open access journals, and providing access by depositing material in open access repositories—and the need to develop appropriate financial as well as legal frameworks to support the moves to make the published findings of research more widely available via the internet.

3.35. The open access movement is clearly an international one, and UK representatives have played a significant role in it. The SHERPA project was established at the University of Nottingham in 2002, funded by JISC, to support the development of institutional repositories and to facilitate the rapid dissemination of research. It soon established the Romeo online database of publishers’ policies relating to the deposit of published articles in repositories, followed by the Juliet database of funders’ policies on open access, and the OpenDoar database of open access repositories. The latter complemented the Directory of Open Access Journals established by the University of Lund in 2003.