Some thoughts over the main declarations that support the open access movement

Internet technologies have a great impact on the publishing industry. Hopefully digital contents in science and technology should have their quality assured by a review process made by peers in order do make them more reliable for the reader (consumer) than other digital contents. The Open Access (OA) movement promotes free delivery of the scholarly literature, by-passing copyright constraints and licenses/authorizations. Two roads widely accepted for OA are the “golden” road and the “green” road. In the first one, journals are OA themselves; in the last one, after publication on a non-OA journal, authors are allowed to store their articles on an institutional or in a thematic repository (OA archives).
Institutional repositories are seen as a new strategy for universities to promote changes in the scholarly communication process. They capture, preserve and give access to digital collections of the intellectual production of one or several universities. The open and wide access may be a way to solve such problems as the high cost of journals’ subscriptions and the acquisition and dissemination of gray literature.
Since institutional repositories are considered one of the main channels for scholarly literature dissemination, it is important and necessary that authors (producers) and
decision-making units carefully analyze the contents of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, and Berlin Declaration on
Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (BBB declarations), which are the more central and influent definitions for the OA movement.
A better understanding of concepts, terminology and definitions of these declarations’ contents is proposed. Copyright, derivative works and quality assurance approaches
are compared and discussed.