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