Open Access publishing movement started in early 2000s, when the academic leaders from around the world participated in the formation of the Budapest Initiative. They developed recommendations for Open Access publishing process “which has worked for the past decade to provide the public with unrestricted, free access to scholarly research—much of which is publicly funded. Making the research publicly available to everyone—free of charge and without most copyright and licensing restrictions—will accelerate scientific research efforts and allow authors to reach a larger number of readers.” (reference: http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/)
IntechOpen’s co-founders, both scientists, created the company while doing research in robotics at the Vienna University. Their goals to spread the research freely “for the scientists, by the scientist’ to the rest of the world, aligned with the Open Access movement, and the company soon became the signator of the Budapest Initiative, which currently has more than 1000 supporting organizations worldwide, ranging from universities to funders.
At IntechOpen, we are excited to be working with organizations and people who care about scientific discovery, put the academic needs of scientific community first, and provide an Open Access environment where scientists can maximize their contribution to humanity. By opening access to the world’s scientific research articles and book chapters, we hope to inspire greater opportunity for collaboration, scientific discovery and progress. We gladly follow the Open Access definition: “By “open access” to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.” (reference: http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/)
