Open Access Policy for this Journal

1. Open Access to Content
Decision Sciences in Human Learning and Development provides immediate open access to its content, based on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

2. Free Access
This journal is an open access journal, which means all content is freely available without charge to users or institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to full-text articles in this journal without requiring prior permission from the publisher or author. This open access policy is in line with the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

By adopting this open access model, Decision Sciences in Human Learning and Development promotes the unrestricted dissemination of scientific knowledge, ensuring that research is accessible to anyone, anywhere, fostering global academic collaboration and advancing research across various fields.

Budapest Open Access Initiative

The Budapest Open Access Initiative emphasizes the convergence of an old tradition and new technology that has created an unprecedented public good. The tradition lies in the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish their research findings in scholarly journals for the sake of inquiry and knowledge, without payment. The new technology is the internet, which has made possible the world-wide electronic distribution of peer-reviewed journal literature and free, unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and anyone with curiosity.

The removal of access barriers to this literature has the potential to accelerate research, enrich education, and create a global exchange of knowledge. This will allow the rich to share their learning with the poor, and vice versa, making this literature more useful and laying the foundation for a united intellectual conversation across humanity in the quest for knowledge.

While open access has, for various reasons, been limited to small portions of journal literature, initiatives in these areas have shown that open access is economically feasible. It provides readers with the power to easily find and make use of relevant literature, and gives authors vast new visibility, readership, and measurable impact. To secure these benefits for all, the Budapest Open Access Initiative calls for greater efforts to remove the barriers—especially financial ones—that impede open access to the full body of scholarly work.

The literature that should be freely accessible includes the peer-reviewed journal articles that scholars contribute to the world without expectation of payment. It also includes unreviewed preprints that scholars may wish to share for feedback or to notify colleagues of important findings. Open access, in this context, means that the literature is freely available on the internet, enabling users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, link to, or use the content for any lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers, except those that are inherent to accessing the internet itself. Copyright should only be used to protect the integrity of the work and ensure proper acknowledgment and citation.

Although the peer-reviewed journal literature should be available at no cost to readers, it is important to recognize that it still requires funding to produce. However, experiments have shown that the costs of providing open access are far lower than those of traditional publishing models. This creates a strong incentive for institutions such as universities, libraries, foundations, and others to embrace open access as a means of advancing their missions. Achieving open access will require new financing models, but the lower overall costs and broader scope of dissemination make the goal attainable.

To achieve open access to scholarly journal literature, two complementary strategies are recommended:

1. Self-Archiving: Scholars need the tools and assistance to deposit their peer-reviewed journal articles into open electronic archives, a practice known as self-archiving. These archives should conform to the standards created by the Open Archives Initiative, making it easier for search engines and other tools to treat separate archives as one. This would allow users to easily find and access relevant research, regardless of where it is stored.

2. Open-Access Journals: Scholars should have the means to create new open-access journals and to support existing journals that wish to transition to open access. These journals would not charge subscription or access fees, and instead, they would use other funding models to cover expenses, such as support from research foundations, governments, universities, or even the researchers themselves. The goal is to ensure that scholarly articles are disseminated as widely as possible, without the limitations imposed by traditional copyright restrictions or subscription fees.

Open access to peer-reviewed journal literature is the goal. Self-archiving (I.) and a new generation of open-access journals (II.) are the ways to attain this goal. They are not only direct and effective means to this end, they are within the reach of scholars themselves, immediately, and need not wait on changes brought about by markets or legislation. While we endorse the two strategies just outlined, we also encourage experimentation with further ways to make the transition from the present methods of dissemination to open access. Flexibility, experimentation, and adaptation to local circumstances are the best ways to assure that progress in diverse settings will be rapid, secure, and long-lived.

The Open Society Institute, the foundation network founded by philanthropist George Soros, is committed to providing initial help and funding to realize this goal. It will use its resources and influence to extend and promote institutional self-archiving, to launch new open-access journals, and to help an open-access journal system become economically self-sustaining. While the Open Society Institute's commitment and resources are substantial, this initiative is very much in need of other organizations to lend their effort and resources.

We invite governments, universities, libraries, journal editors, publishers, foundations, learned societies, professional associations, and individual scholars who share our vision to join us in the task of removing the barriers to open access and building a future in which research and education in every part of the world are that much more free to flourish.

February 14, 2002
Budapest, Hungary

Leslie Chan: Bioline International
Darius Cuplinskas: Director, Information Program, Open Society Institute
Michael Eisen: Public Library of Science
Fred Friend: Director Scholarly Communication, University College London
Yana Genova: Next Page Foundation
Jean-Claude Gu don: University of Montreal
Melissa Hagemann: Program Officer, Information Program, Open Society Institute
Stevan Harnad: Professor of Cognitive Science, University of Southampton, Universite du Quebec a Montreal
Rick Johnson: Director, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
Rima Kupryte: Open Society Institute
Manfredi La Manna: Electronic Society for Social Scientists 
Istv n R v: Open Society Institute, Open Society Archives
Monika Segbert: eIFL Project consultant 
Sidnei de Souza: Informatics Director at CRIA, Bioline International
Peter Suber: Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College & The Free Online Scholarship Newsletter
Jan Velterop: Publisher, BioMed Central.