This page is about pledges made prior to 2012. In 2012, the rate of pledging increased rapidly, especially in fields less beholden to conventional journals. As a consequence, the numbers pledging on their own blogs may now be too large to keep up with. A benefit of also pledging with a website like this one is that observers can see that large numbers have pledged.

Outside of this website, Open Access pledges have been made by institutions (such as universities and funders) and by individuals. There are two kinds of individual Open Access pledges. In author pledges, researchers pledge to make their own work OA, and in reviewing pledges other researchers pledge only to serve as referees for OA journals. (In the pledge we have formulated on this site, both Green and Gold OA are accommodated as the pledge includes reviewing manuscripts destined to be open because they’ll be put in free repositories – Green OA)

Author pledges

• PLoS letter; originally a March 2001 letter to the editor of Science; here’s an archived copy and the signatures
• Larry Lessig‘s pledge from March 2005 is offline, but here’s is a post about it)
• Science Commons, Open Access Law: Author Pledge (June 2005)
  http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/oalaw/oalawpledge/
  http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005/06/oa-law-program-from-science-commons.html-the signature link is now dead
• Scott Aaronson
• Danah Boyd (February 2008; also see Suber on it)
• Open Access Philosophy pledge (June 2008)
  http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/06/free-philosophy-pledge.html
• Rick Grush
• Jason Baird Jackson
• Ben Adida, Sep 2011
• Steve Wheeler, Sep 2011
• Alex Couros, June 2011
• Maura A. Smale, Oct 2011

Reviewing pledges

• PLoS letter (above)
• Ted Bergstrom (2001)
• Nick Montfort (December 2007) (also see the many comments)
• Bill Hooker (January 2007)
• Chris Kelty; mentioned in this March 2008 blog post but no precise reference or deep link
• Peter Murray-Rust , mentioned in comment on Michael Taylor’s pledge
• Jason Baird Jackson
• Martin Weller (June 2010)
• Michael Rees (June 2010) (following Martin Weller)
• Michael P. Taylor (Sep 2011)
• Steve Wheeler Oct 2011
• Alex Couros, June 2011
• Maura A. Smale, Oct 2011
• Hundreds of computer scientists have pledged in a nice pledging website created independently, mostly targeting computer security conferences and journals, started in Oct 2011

Most of this list was provided by James