LONDON — The campaign to provide free access to scientific research has been given fresh impetus by a $3 million grant from the Open Society Institute, an organization set up by financier and philanthropist George Soros to promote greater openness in society. The money is intended to finance initiatives to make research freely available to scientists around the world, free of the financial constraints of journal subscriptions.

The funds have been provided through the establishment of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), a new attempt to break the traditional model of research publishing. The initiative — announced on 14 February 2002 — outlines a set of principles and strategies for online publication and storage of research findings. Backed by a growing number of supporters of open access, the initiative calls for two complementary strategies.

The first is a system of self-archiving, where researchers deposit their articles, or preprints, in open electronic archives that will be completely searchable.

The second involves setting up new journals that charge no subscription or access fees but will instead generate revenue to cover their expenses from a range of other possible sources. These include everything from securing funding from governments or foundations that subsidize research to contributions from the researchers themselves.

The initiative — which has the backing and involvement of BioMed Central (BMC) — has so far attracted signatures from researchers, universities, labs, libraries, journals and publishers.

Like the Public Library of Science, which last year launched a campaign to pressurize all commercial journals to ensure free access, the BOAI aims to utilize new technology to overhaul the traditional methods of disseminating valuable research findings. But unlike the PLoS, which advocates a boycott of commercial journals that do not provide free access, the BOAI aim is to gradually entice researchers away from established publications with the prospect of eventually accessing a much wider global audience.

A statement announcing its launch said: "An old tradition and 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."

BMC publisher Jan Velterop said although it may be difficult persuading scientists to forsake the kudos that goes with having work published in journals such as Nature or Science, this research represents just a fraction of the global science community's output.

"It's a small percentage of the total literature. What we hope will happen is that all those people who publish in journals that are essentially journals of record will publish electronically, where the exposure of their articles will be so much greater.

"At BMC we already have, on average, in the order of 200 full text downloads per article per month, compared to less than six per article per month for ScienceDirect (the Elsevier Science online resource)."