Open access for UCL research product

University College London (UCL) has established the UCL Publications Board to implement the university’s open access policy and be responsible for ensuring that, subject to copyright permissions, all UCL research is placed online in the university’s institutional repository, freely accessible to all. According to a UCL press release,

"This move places UCL at the forefront of academic institutions who are pioneering the move to Open Access, as the first European university ranked in the global top ten in the THE–QS world university rankings to do so.

Open access is a new form of dissemination for published books, articles, conference proceedings and digital outputs. Its principles are based on the Berlin Declaration, which urges authors to retain the rights in the materials they produce and to place a copy in an open access medium – in UCL’s case the university’s electronic repository – so that they are available free at point of use to anyone, anywhere in the world, with an Internet connection....”

You can read the 2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access here. More fun to read, though, is the urban legend attached to the Berlin Declaration of 1963, which you can read about here.