This document provides a historical overview of open access and summarizes key events in the development of the open access movement: - The Berlin Declaration of 2003 launched the concept of open access globally and has since been signed by over 200 institutions. - Technological advances now allow for digitization and online dissemination of research, removing previous barriers to free access. - Early conferences in Budapest (2001) and Bethesda (2003) helped establish definitions and goals around providing free access to peer-reviewed journal articles. - Subsequent conferences addressed technical implementation questions around repositories and metadata harvesting protocols. - While interest in open access has grown, it has yet to become a mainstream publication model in acade

1. Open Access – A Historical Survey / Peter Schirmbacher, Department of Library and Information
Science, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
开放获取：历史考查 / 彼得·席姆巴哈，柏林洪堡大学图书信息学系
‘Our mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete if the information is not made widely
and readily available to society. New possibilities of knowledge dissemination not only through the
classical form, but also and increasingly through the Open Access paradigm via the Internet have to be
supported.’ This is a statement in the ‘Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the
Sciences and Humanities’ of October 2003(16), signed by all the leading German academic
organisations and funding bodies, and in the meantime also by 227 academic institutions worldwide.
“如果信息不能全面且实时地被社会所用，传播知识的任务只算完成一半。知识传播不以传统方
式为限，越来越多地经由因特网、以开放获取的模式。”引言出自 2003 年 10 月的“柏林宣言：
开放获取科学与人文科学知识”（注 16），由德国知名学术机构和资助团体签署，目前已由全
球 227 个学术机构签署。
注 16: Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities = [柏林宣
言：开放获取科学与人文学知识], http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-
berlin/BerlinDeclaration_dt.pdf [2008 年 10 月, 已有 255 个学术机构签署]
This declaration is well-known to many people, because it launched the notion of Open Access not
only in Germany but worldwide. More than three years have elapsed since this conference in Berlin,
and these years have made it clear that the path from public perception to constructive implementation
can be a long one. On the other hand, three years is a relatively short time in light of the fact that
unhindered access to the results of academic research has always occupied mankind. For a long time,
the question was one of technical barriers to duplication. These were to some extent broken down only
in 1452 by Gutenberg’s invention of ‘movable types’. Of no small importance was the quality of local
libraries, which was decisive in determining whether one had a chance of getting hold of the latest
insights of the academic community or not. Of course it has always been and still is a question of
publishing economics, which even in the academic world was and is determined by supply and
demand. These aspects make it clear that, in the past, preconditions and chances of realisation
precluded raising the question of free access to academic information.
这项宣言提出的概念，不仅被德国接受，也传遍全世界。柏林会议已经过去三年了，这些年的
实践表明，将此概念由公众认知迈向建设性实施之路是漫长的。另一方面，相对于一直以来人
们所希望的无阻碍地获取学术研究成果，三年时间还很短暂。曾经有很长一段时间，这是个复
制的技术性障碍问题，直到 1452 年，古腾堡发明“活字印刷”后，才在某种程度上打破此障碍。
然而，本地图书馆的质量，仍是决定是否有机会掌握学界最新见解的重要因素。当然，还存在
出版经济学问题，即使在学术界，还是由供需关系决定。显然，过去的现实情况和机会，阻碍
了提出自由获取学术信息的问题。
The decisive difference today lies in the possibility to digitise research results and thus the real option
of placing them at users’ disposal worldwide via the Internet. Thus the technical barriers to free access
have come down. The greatest upheaval in the history of academic communication is currently under
way, and it has forced a debate about a new culture of academic publishing. One component of the
discussion is the confrontation with the question of whether and how we organise access to
information. Technically, digitisation and the Internet create the preconditions to allow free worldwide
and unrestricted access to knowledge as it appears. However, this presupposes that we can answer the
question of who will bear the costs involved, as in any other form of publishing. There is a whole
variety of publishing business models, which will be examined in greater detail later in this book.

2. 当今的决定性区别，在于有可能把研究成果数字化，然后可以依使用者的意愿，把它们放到因
特网上。自由获取的技术性障碍已经不存在，它掀起学术交流史上的最大动荡，
引起学术出版新文化的激辩，其中一个议题是如何组织知识获取。从技术上讲，数字化和因特
网创造出一个自由无限制全球获取信息的先决条件。然而，如同任何其它出版形式，必须先解
决谁来承担相关的费用。本书将详细考察各种出版的商业模式。
It should be noted, however, that the upheaval in academic communication demands more than just the
solution to an economic problem. The rules governing concerned actors as well as their behaviour have
developed over hundreds of years. An upheaval on this scale is not easy to cope with, for almost any
change carries its own dangers and can bring not just benefits for all those involved, but also effects
that cannot be immediately foreseen. Criticism of Open Access comes not only from established
academic publishers, but also from authors who fear for their income from authors’ contracts. Above
all, the system of assessing scientific and scholarly performance, which has hitherto been organised by
the publishers, could go off the rails if anyone could simply upload results on to the Internet, and if
there were no longer any kudos in having articles published in reputable academic journals.
应该指出的是，学术交流的动荡不仅要求解决经济问题而已。支配学术交流参与者及其行为的
规则，已历数百年之久。现在的动荡规模不易应付，几乎任何改变都有其威险性，带来的可能
不只是好处，任何改变都可能造成无法立即预见的结果。对开放获取的批评，不仅来自知名的
学术出版社，也来自担心不能依合约获利的作者。最重要的是，如果任何人都可任意上传研究
成果至因特网，而不在意是否在知名学术期刊上发表文章，那么迄今为止由出版社构建的评鉴
科学和学术绩效的系统，可能走向崩解之路。
The development of the Open Access initiative makes clear the stages in the upheaval of the academic
communication system. Peter Suber, one of the main voices of the Open Access initiative, has worked
out a ‘Timeline of the Open Access Movement’(17), in which many details and basic data of the
evolution to date are listed. The conference mentioned at the beginning of this section culminating in
the Berlin Declaration was the third to be held on this subject. The first conference to deal with the
matter was organised by the OSI (Open Society Institute) in Budapest in December 2001. The scientists
and scholars who took part in it had set themselves the goal of finding a way to bring together existing
Open Access activities and, as a first step, to determine the kinds of academic literature for which free
access should be made possible. On 14 February 2002 a corresponding call to an initiative appeared,
which in the meantime (as of March 2007) has been signed by 4 391 individuals and 391 academic
organisations: ‘An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an
unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the
fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge.
The new technology is the Internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic
distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by
all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds.’
开放获取倡议的发展，明确界定学术交流系统的各个动荡阶段。开放获取倡议的主要喉舌之一
彼得·萨伯在《开放获取运动时间表》（注 17）一文中，依时间列出变化的诸多细节及基本数
据。本节前述的会议达成了柏林宣言，是此一主题的第三次会议。第一次会议由 OSI（开放社
会研究院）组织，于 2001 年 12 月在布达佩斯召开。与会的科学家及学者定位其目标为，发现
聚集现有开放获取活动的方法，以及首先确定有可能达成自由获取的学术文献的类型。2002 年
2 月 14 日，以通信方式开始一项倡议（即布达佩斯开放获取倡议），目前（到 2007 年 3 月）已
有 4,391 个人和 391 学术团体签署：“传统和新技术相遇，使史无前例的公共品成为可能。传统
指科学家及学者，为提供咨询与知识，愿意不收取报酬，在学术期刊发表其研究成果；新技术
指因特网；公共品指经同行评议的期刊文献，以电子方式在全球各地传播，所有的科学家、学
者、教师、学生及其他求知者，都可以完全自由且无限制地获取。”

3. 注 17: Timeline of the Open Access Movement = [开放获取运动时间表] / Peter Suber,
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm.
This call has generally been described as the ‘birth’ of the Open Access initiative, although this does
not do justice to all the activists who, years earlier, had strongly supported free access to academic
information. It is often forgotten or overlooked that this first call was only concerned with guaranteeing
free access to journal articles which had already undergone the peer review process and which, in
parallel with publication in the journal, should be made freely available on the Internet. As a rule, this
concerns only those authors who cannot expect any royalties or fees for the articles they publish. The
authors of other works, for example textbooks or monographs, were therefore not to be deprived of
potential income. In addition, those authors who are not remunerated directly for their academic works
are called upon to place their full texts on the Internet, as is the case for dissertations and research
reports.
此一呼吁一般被称为开放获取倡议的“起源”，尽管对于所有积极分子而言，这种称呼并不公
平，因为在此之前多年，他们已经强烈支持自由获取学术信息。人们往往忘记或忽视，此首个
倡议只关注保障自由获取已经进入同行评审过程的期刊论文，在期刊出版的同时，应该可以在
因特网上自由取得。一般而言，这仅涉及不期望通过发表文章收取版税的作者，其他作品如教
科书或专著的作者，其潜在收入并不受影响。此外，没有直接从学术作品取得报酬的作者，也
被要求将作品全文置于因特网上，比如学位论文及研究报告。
A full year later, on 11 April 2003 in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, a discussion was held on the
possibilities of better integrating actors of the publication process. It resulted in the statements of the
‘Libraries and Publishers Group’ and the ‘Scientists and Scientific Societies Group’(18). The third
conference, in Berlin, marked both an end point and a new start. It represented an end point in that
academic policy goals had been formulated, and, as Peter Suber puts it, because a ‘BBB-definition
(Budapest-Bethesda-Berlin) of Open Access’ had been established. At the same time, it represented a
starting point with regard to technical and organisational questions.
整整一年后，2003 年 4 月 11 日，在美国马里兰州的毕士大举行了一场讨论，探讨更好地整合出
版过程各参与者的可能，最后形成一个由“图书馆与出版社组”和“科学家与科学学会组”提出的
声明（注 18）。第三次会议在柏林举行，既是终点也是新的起点。它所代表的终点，是学术政
策的目标已经制定完成，如彼得·萨伯所述，“开放获取的 3B 定义（布达佩斯-比士大-柏林）”已
经建立。而它所代表的起点，是转向技术和组织的问题。
注 18: Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing = [毕士大开放获取出版声明], Released June
20, 2003, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm.
Thus the follow-up conferences in Geneva, Southampton, Potsdam and Geneva again dealt with
matters of technical implementation, such as the use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for
Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) or the building and visibility of institutional and disciplinary
repositories. A series of contributions in this handbook take a detailed look at these topics. The focus of
the Southampton meeting was to call for all scientific and scholarly institutions to adopt an Open
Access policy of their own in order to be able to better address researchers locally. Since then, there has
been growing interest in Open Access, but it has not yet established itself as an alternative form of
publication in the academic world.
后续会议分别在日内瓦、南安普敦、波茨坦和日内瓦举行，探讨技术实施事项，如使用开放档
案计划元数据收割协议（OAI-PMH），或建立并开放访问机构及学科典藏库。本手册详细探讨
这些课题。南安普敦会议的重点，是呼吁所有的科学和学术机采用自己的开放获取政策，以期
更好地在本地研究者中推广。自此以后，开放获取越来越受重视，但还未成为学术界的另一种
出版模式。

4. p. 24-26
Open Access: Opportunities and challenges. A handbook [开放获取 : 机会及挑战] / European
Commission/German Commission for UNESCO). -- Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of
the European Communities, 2008. -- 144 pp., 14.8 x 21.0 cm. -- ISBN 978-92-79-06665-8. -- EUR
23459, http://tinyurl.com/3q8wo5