From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:26:22 -0600

The reason for NOT limiting the definition of OA to just how the BOAI
defined it was explained in the AAUP Statement on Open Access, which i
drafted during my year as AAUP President in 2007/8. It may be found
here: http://www.aaupnet.org/policy-areas/copyright-a-access/open-access.
here is an excerpt that speaks to the point:

The well-known Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), in promoting a
solution to the high price of STM journals, defines open access as
"permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print,
search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for
indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other
lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other
than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself."3
In principle, this definition of open access could be applied to all
types of scholarly publishing, and calls for widespread use of
institutional repositories and for self-archiving by individual

scholars in order to promote such open access are by no means limited
to just STM journal literature. Although the debate over open access
has centered almost exclusively on one sector of publishing, STM
journals, there is no reason to limit the discussion to that sector
and indeed, given the interconnectedness of knowledge, it is unwise
not to explore the implications of open access for all fields of
knowledge lest an unfortunate new "digital divide" should arise
between fields and between different types of publishing. The recently
proposed legislation known as the Federal Research Public Access Act
of 2006 (FRPAA) would affect a wide range of research that receives
funding from 11 federal agencies, including the National Science
Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Departments
of Energy, Education, and Defense. The American Council of Learned
Societies, in its 2006 report on "Cyberinfrastructure for the
Humanities and Social Sciences," has advocated such open access for
all social science and humanities scholarship. However, there is a
wide range of models that can be subsumed under the generic term "open
access," with both risks and benefits to the entire system of
scholarly communications that are as yet not fully understood.

By limiting its own definition to just "articles" (and implicitly to
just the STM literature), the BOIA definition arbitrarily restricts
the OA movement unnecessarily, in my opinion.


Sandy Thatcher