Timeline 2004

This list is part of the Open Access Directory.

• This is a section within the larger Timeline of the open access movement.

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• January 2004. Twenty-five journal editors and the World Health Organization released the public statement, Galvanising Mental Health Research in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Role of Scientific Journals. One of its recommendations is that journals provide open access to their contents.

• January 15, 2004. The Valparaiso Declaration for Improved Scientific Communication in the Electronic Medium released in Chile.

• January 20, 2004. The National Library of Canada (NLC) started providing open access to doctoral dissertations on deposit at Theses Canada.

• January 27, 2004. The entire editorial board of Les cahiers du numérique resigned in order protest the journal's high price and limited online access policy. See Journal declarations of independence.

• January 30, 2004. Ministerial representatives from 34 nations to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) issued the Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding (scroll down to Annex 1). Also see the subsequent work of the drafters, The Public Domain of Digital Research Data.

• February 9, 2004. France's Institut Jean Nicod adopted a Jean Nicod policy asking faculty to self-archive their preprints and postprints.

• February 24, 2004. The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) released the IFLA Statement on Open Access to Scholarly Literature and Research Documentation. This statement was adopted by the IFLA Governing Board on December 5, 2003, but not published until February 24, 2004.

• March 16, 2004. A group of 48 non-profit publishers issued the Washington D.C. Principles for Free Access to Science. (See SOAN for 4/2/04.)

• March 26, 2004. The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) released the ALPSP Principles of Scholarship-Friendly Journal Publishing Practice.

• April 28, 2004. Google and CrossRef announced the pilot of CrossRef Search.

• May 14, 2004. Participants at the 8° Congresso Nacional de Bibliotecârios Arquivistas e Documentalistas (Estoril, Portugal) issued the Declaraçâo do Estoril sobre o Acesso â Informaçâo.

• May 21, 2004. Participants at the 2nd Simposio Internaciaonal Bibliotecas Digitais (II SIBD or International Digital Libraries Symposium) in Campinas, Brazil, on May 21, 2004 issued a statement in support of open access.

• May 25, 2004. The Australian Group of Eight, the country's eight leading research universities, released a Statement on open access to scholarly information May ….pdf Statement on open access to scholarly information.

• June 3, 2004. Elsevier announced its new policy permitting authors to post the final editions of their full-text Elsevier articles to their personal web sites or institutional repositories. The policy was officially announced on June 3 but first publicized on May 27. (See SOAN for 6/2/04 and 7/2/04.)

• June 3, 2004. The Directory of Open Access Journals started offering article-level searching of participating journals in its index.

• June 5, 2004. The Special Libraries Association released a Statement Regarding Open Access.

• June 15, 2004. The European Commission launched an inquiry into the system for publishing European research. Among the major topics are rapidly rising journal prices and open access to research findings.

• June 19, 2004. The British Columbia Library Association adopted A Resolution on Open Access.

• July 3, 2004. Springer launched its Open Choice hybrid journal program.

• July 5, 2004. The Göttingen Declaration on Copyright for Education and Research is published by the Coalition for Action. See the institutional signatories.

• July 14, 2004. The U.S. House Appropriations Committee adopted language proposing that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) require open access to NIH-funded research through deposit in the NIH's PubMed Central. (See my FAQ on the plan and SOAN for 8/2/04.) The NIH adopted such a policy on February 3, 2005, and it went into effect on May 2, 2005 (both below).

• July 20, 2004. The U.K. House of Commons Science and Technology Committee issued a lengthy report based on its inquiry into journal prices and open access. The report recommended that public funding agencies require open access to publicly-funded research through deposit in the authors' institutional repositories. It also recommended further study of the upfront funding model for open-access journals. (See SOAN for 8/2/04.)

• August 24, 2004. A large number of U.S. public-interest groups launched the Alliance for Taxpayer Access to support open access to taxpayer-funded research.

• August 26, 2004. Twenty-five Nobel laureates from the U.S. wrote an open letter to the U.S. Congress in support of the NIH open-access plan.

• August 28, 2004. Participants in the First Social Forum on Information, Documentation and Libraries (Buenos Aires, August 26-28, 2004) issued the Declaration from Buenos Aires On information, documentation and libraries.

• September 3, 2004. The U.S. National Institutes of Health released its open-access plan, Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information, for a 60 day period of public comment. On September 17 the same text was published in the Federal Register for another 60 day period of public comment. On February 3, 2005, the NIH published the final version of the policy. On May 2, 2005, it went into effect. (See my FAQ for more details on the procedural history of this policy.)

• September 8, 2004. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) issued a public statement calling for an open-access registry and database of drug trial data, and announcing that its member journals would not publish research articles based on unregistered drug trials.

• September 8, 2004. A panel of the National Research Council concluded that the benefits of open access to genome data on pathogens outweigh the risk of misuse by terrorists. See the panel's press release and full report.

• October 5, 2004. Sage Publications adopted a new policy to allow its authors to deposit their postprints on open-access institutional repositories without case-by-case permission.

• October 6, 2004. Google officially launched Google Print, which eventually differentiated into the Google Publisher program (book scanning with the consent of publishers) and the Google Library program (book scanning with the consent of libraries and not necessarily the consent of publishers). Prior to the official launch, the beta was publicly revealed as early as December 2003.

• October 11, 2004. The Scottish Science Information Strategy Working Group released the Scottish Declaration of Open Access. While signed and released on October 11, 2004, it was not made official until March 14, 2005.

• October 18, 2004. The Public Library of Science launched its second open-access journal, PLoS Medicine.

• November 5, 2004. Thirty-two Italian university rectors signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge and released the Messina Declaration.

• November 15, 2004. The American Institute of Physics (AIP) adopted its Author Select hybrid journal program.

• November 18, 2004. Google announced the launch of Google Scholar.

• November 19, 2004. The third IUCN World Conservation Congress (Bangkok, November 17-25) released the Conservation Commons Statement of Principles calling for open access to biodiversity data and knowledge.

• December 1, 2004. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced an open-access and interoperability policy for taxpayer-funded weather, water, and climate data. The new policy was opposed by private, for-profit weather services.

• December 1, 2004. Participants at the conference on Ocean Biodiversity Informatics (Hamburg, November 29 - December 2, 2004) issued the Ocean Biodiversity Informatics conference statement calling for free and open sharing of data.

• December 6, 2004. Portugal's University of Minho adopted a do Minho, Portugal policy mandating that its faculty deposit their research (with a few exceptions), and that grad students deposit their theses and dissertations, in the university's open-access repository. The policy took effect on January 1, 2005

• December 14, 2004. Google announced its project to digitize and index millions of public-domain and copyrighted books from five major libraries.

• December 17, 2004. The Australian Research Information Infrastructure Committee (ARIIC) issued its Open Access Statement.