Washington DC—On November 1, 2011, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) joined over 300 organizations and institutions to endorse the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.

In a letter to Dr. Peter Gruss, President of the Max Planck Society, Winston Tabb, ARL President and Sheridan Dean of University Libraries and Museums at The Johns Hopkins University, wrote, “The Association of Research Libraries has been a longtime and consistent supporter of Open Access and has worked hard to advance its principles internationally. During the October 2011 meeting of the Board of Directors a decision was taken to become a signatory to the Berlin Declaration. I am pleased to extend our endorsement of the Declaration and join the growing number of signatories from North America.”

The Berlin Declaration was drafted by the Max Planck Society to, in part, “promote the Internet as a functional instrument for a global scientific knowledge base and human reflection and to specify measures which research policy makers, research institutions, funding agencies, libraries, archives, and museums need to consider.”

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 126 research libraries in the US and Canada. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at http://www.arl.org/ .

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