From: Heather Morrison <[log in to unmask]> Date: Tue, 3 Jan 2012 16:28:10 -0800 Sally Morris <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Surely the term 'Open Access' refers to the access - which is, after all, far and away the most important point; any stipulations about reuse are not, strictly, about access? Heather Morrison Comment: The Budapest Open Access Initiative definition reads: By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, 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. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. From: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read There are a variety of ways of providing various degrees of "free" that are not full open access. One of the basic distinctions is between "gratis" - free to read - and "libre" - free for reuse. Peter Suber detailed the differences in the August 2008 SPARC Open Access Newsletter: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-08.htm#gratis-libre There are nuances and variations within libre and gratis open access. My perspective is that what we are seeing at the moment is what I call the challenges of success of open access. Many existing and new publishers want to be (or be considered to be) open access. This raises a number of interesting questions about what should be considered as the minimum for open access. I think lots of discussion is needed. Perhaps Liblicense is one good venue for this discussion? As a starter, I would suggest that gratis open access means, at minimum, free to read, download and print, for anyone, anywhere, regardless of circumstances. This is important, because it means that open access using a "noncommercial" license should be restricted to something like the meaning of "no resale". Using content for advertising purposes would not be acceptable, but I am wondering whether this would be a violation of the author's moral rights regardless of CC license. The term open access can refer to a work, a process, an organization, etc. When a journal makes articles freely available after an embargo period, to avoid confusion I recommend referring to this approach as "free back issues", not open access. Once the works themselves become freely available, then they are open access. best, Heather Morrison, MLIS Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School of Communication http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/ The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com