Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

From: Jan Velterop <jan_at_biomedcentral.com>
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 13:26:57 +0000

Sally Morris wrote:

> The core, essential feature is free, unrestricted access (to primary
> research articles) for everyone. This can take 2 forms:
>
> 1) In Stevan's term, 'self-archiving' - posting, generally
> by authors or institutions, of preprints, postprints or both, on
> personal/departmental websites, discipline-based archives, or - more
> recently - institutional archives. These may or may not replicate what
> appears in published journals; many, but not all, publishers readily
> permit this. The articles may or not be OAI-discoverable.
>
> 2) What are becoming known as 'Open Access journals' - that is to say,
> journals which (in all probability) maintain the traditional standards
> of peer review, and as much as possible of the other value that the
> publication process adds (editing, linking etc), but which recover costs
> (not forgetting overheads, and whatever degree of surplus/profit is
> necessary to the operation of the organisation doing the publishing)
> in some other way than by charging for access.
>
> In neither case is any of the following a sine qua non, though they
> appear to be 'articles of faith' for some:
>
> * Copyright retention by the author, or the author's institution (or,
> for that matter, absence of copyright - i.e. 'public domain')
> * OAI compliance
> * Absence of restrictions on re-use (including commercial re-use)
> * Deposit in a specific type of archive
>
> Am I alone in seeing it this way?
> Sally

Sally,

The points you list are in my view all 'sine qua non'for Open
Access, with the possible exception of the copyright, which can be held
by anybody else, as long as the full attribution licence is signed by
that copyrightholder.

I'm fully with Mike in this discussion. He put it admirably clearly.

Happy New Year to you all!

Jan
Received on Wed Dec 31 2003 - 13:26:57 GMT