Participants of the 19 –th International Crimean Conference "Crimea 2012: Libraries and information recourses in modern world of science, culture, education and business ” proclaim a Crimea Open Access Manifesto.

Crimea Open Access Manifesto

June 4-8, 2012, Sudak, Crimea, Ukraine

We, the participants of the 19 –th International Crimean Conference "Crimea 2012: Libraries and information recourses in modern world of science, culture, education and business ” – one the most important world professional event for librarians and publishers, scholars and professors, museum and archive specialists, entrepreneurs, law specialists, representatives of education, culture and science; supporting the Open Access Initiative and principles of free access to information, claim as follows

Open access to scholarly information - the basis of modern Information Society and Knowledge Society; science, culture, education development in global world.

Open access to scholarly information as the most important condition for integration to the world scholarly community especially current for the scholars- representatives of developing and independent countries (where the tradition of information barriers has been present for many years).

We are concerned by the fact of the limited access to scholarly information via libraries due to high prices on scholar literature especially on scholarly journals, and by the lack of opportunity to subscribe and buy necessary materials for the users.

We are concerned by the fact of limited dissemination of the research results via traditional scholarly communication model especially in new independent countries..

We are sure that the Open Access model (via creation and usage of open access scholarly journals and open access institutional and thematic repositories) – is not only a successful way of scholarly communication but also the most important condition to increase scholarly, social, and economical significance of research; collaborative research developments; integration to the global academic society.

We support significant initiatives and international Open Access projects: Budapest and Berlin Declarations; IFLA declarations, programmes of SPARC, LIBER, EIFL, COAR, OASPA; European Universities Association etc.

We address the researchers from all over the world with the claim to publish their research results (articles, reports, dissertations etc.) in open access scholarly journals and to deposit them in thematic or institutional open access repositories.

We address the universities and other research institutions with the claim to develop institutional policies and strategies of the open access to full texts peer-reviewed research results (via open access journals and open access institutional repositories); to assist free use of this information for scholarly and academic activity.

We address the publishers of academic journals to treat the authors rights respectfully and not to prevent scholars to deposit their postprints in the open access repositories without limitations or with minimal embargo period.

We address the libraries with the claim to promote open access among the users. University and academic libraries should initiate creation and development of institutional and thematic open access repositories as the tools of providing open access to research materials and to increase visibility and prestige of the university or scholarly community; providing archiving and preservation of scholarly publications. Public libraries could help with professional search of scholarly information in open access, initiate the creation of local communities’ repositories. When setting-up the repositories, one should take into consideration international experience, interoperability, OAI-PMH – compatibility.

We suggest to create, as one of the future steps, the Crimean Open Access repository on the basis of the State Public Research and Technical Library of Russia, National University of Kyiv–Mohyla Academy, and Crimean Ivan Franko Universal Research Library. We plan not only deposit all papers from all Crimean conferences but also other publications of all Crimean conference participants who want to share their research results.

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