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The iSummit participants voted to direct the iCommons board to sign the Berlin and Budapest Declarations. We are, however, taking comments to finalize the text of the resolution. Please do not edit directly but add your comments/edits below under 'Comments' by Thursday, the 13th of July.

RIO 2006 DECLARATION ON OPEN ACCESS

PREAMBLE

AS THE ATTENDEES OF THE 2006 ICOMMONS ISUMMIT, WE BELIEVE that the future of scientific research, higher learning, and education requires that members of the reading and researching public have the broadest and timeliest feasible access to the scholarly record.

WHEREAS digital technology presents a range of opportunities and challenges for effective scholarly communication, and quality control through peer review remains essential for effective scholarship communication, and

WHEREAS, authors continue to enter into publication agreements that convey substantively all rights under copyright in the peer-reviewed scholarly literature to scholarly publishers, and

WHEREAS under current arrangements faculty authors retain insufficient freedoms to their contributions to the peer-reviewed scholarly literature to ensure that their works are fully accessible to students and other scholars, and

WHEREAS the current terms, delays, and high costs of access to the peer-reviewed scholarly literature do not adequately support the international community’s missions of education and preservation of knowledge.

DECLARATION

WE BELIEVE THAT the scholarly literature – the professional research literature in all the fields of the sciences and humanities – should be available to the world under “open access” conditions.

WE BELIEVE THAT “open access scholarly literature” means:

(1) Scholarly literature that is free of charge for the reader.
(2) Scholarly literature that is free of unnecessary licensing restrictins, with explicit consent in advance to unrestricted reading, downloading, copying, sharing, storing, printing, searching, linking and crawling.
(3) Scholarly literature that is free form filters, digital rights management and censors.
(4) Scholarly literature that is available on the public internet in a form in which users can read, copy, redistribute, link, print, crawl, download, store, and search the full text.

NOW THEREFORE, WE, the attendees of the 2006 iCommons iSummit, hereby call upon the iCommons organization and the Board of Directors to:

(1) Sign the Berlin and Budapest Declarations on Open Access,
(2) Commit resources to promote international awareness of these issues and to encourage and assist members of the iCommons community who seek to implement Open Access in their home countries,
(3) Promote and support the implementation of contractual tools such as the Science Commons Author’s Addenda, which reflect reasonable terms that balance the interests of institutions of higher education and scholarly publishers; and
(4) Commit resources to encourage that those members of the international community who have the right to make their contributions to the peer-reviewed literature available on the public internet do so.

Comments: Add your comments here

Please correct two typos:

• resgtrictins --> restrictions
• free form filters --> free from filters

I think we should change the following sentence: WE BELIEVE THAT “open access” means: by WE BELIEVE THAT “open access literature” means: Because we are not defining just "open access" that could be applied to other issues for instnce "publication", "research", "data",...

We might say something about "promoting open access journals".