"Open Access is NOT a publishing model"

Exactly right. OA is a characteristic of an item of scholarly literature. Not 
even of a journal or publisher (though all items/articles they publish may of 
course be OA, in which case the terms 'OA journal' and 'OA publisher' are 
shorthand for that).

This is also why mandates should require open access, and not get into how that 
open access is obtained (via a 'gold' or 'green' – or any other – route), as 
the latter only serves to cloud the issue and causes unnecessary confusion and 
conflation with financial issues that may be legitimate in their own right, but 
are different from the open access issue.

Furthermore, 'libre open access' is a tautology. Open access *is* libre access 
(and in French often referred to as such). And 'gratis open access' implies too 
much. What is called 'gratis open access' is just 'gratis access'. At the first 
BOAI meeting, the term 'open access' was advisedly chosen to describe something 
more than just gratis access. The term 'free access' was rejected because of 
the ambiguity in the English language of the word 'free', since it could be 
read to mean just 'gratis'. The word 'open', since it implies 'free', but could 
be read to be more encompassing, was deemed to be more suitable as shorthand 
for scholarly literature's "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."

Jan Velterop
 
On 26 Nov 2013, at 06:50, Andrew A. Adams <[email protected]> wrote:

> Rick Anderson wrote:
>> Researchers tend to see OA models as presenting a mixed bag of upsides
>> and downsides (as any publishing model does).
> 
> Open Access is NOT a publishing model. It is a descriptive binary property of 
> an article: is it available electronically, without fee, from an easily 
> locatable source (gratis OA; and with a suitable license for libre OA)?
> 
> Green OA is not 8directly) about publishing models (though if we reach close 
> to 100% Green gratis OA there may be consequences for some business models of 
> publishing).
> 
> There are many routes to OA, some involving new publishing models, but OA is 
> a description not a model.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Professor Andrew A Adams                      [email protected]
> Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
> Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
> Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/
> 
> 
> 
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