A new US$3-million initiative to support free electronic article repositories and ‘alternative’ journals committed to open access was launched on 14 February in Hungary.

The Budapest Open Archive Initiative, backed by the financier and philanthropist George Soros, shares some of its objectives with the Public Library of Science, which last year sought to organise a researchers’ boycott of journals that refused to cooperate with its campaign for free access to scientific literature.

But instead of seeking to influence publishers, the Budapest initiative will attempt to win support for open-access publishing from within the academic community.

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Reference: Nature 415, 721 (2002)