Open Access: "Gratis" and "Libre"

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2008 13:57:13 -0400

This is re-posted from Peter Suber's Open Access News. (This is to
register 100% agreement on this definition of "Gratis" and "Libre"
OA, and on the new choice of terms.):

____________________________________________________________________________
      Peter Suber:
                Green/gold OA and gratis/libre OA

      This table is to accompany an article in the August issue
      of SOAN, which I just mailed.  But I hope it will also be
      useful in its own right.  (SOAN uses plain text and
      doesn't support tables.) 


        Gratis OA 
      (removing price barriers)Libre OA 
      (removing both price and permission barriers)
      Green OA 
      (through repositories) 12
      Gold OA 
      (through journals)3 4


      Some observations:

       o In April 2008, Stevan Harnad and I proposed some
          terms to describe two kinds of free online access: 
          the kind which removes price barriers alone and the
          kind which removes price barriers and at least some
          permission barriers as well.  The distinction is
          fundamental and widely-recognized, but we saw right
          away that our terms (weak OA and strong OA) were
          ill-chosen and we stopped using them.  However, all
          of us who work for OA and talk about OA still need
          vocabulary to describe this basic distinction.  The
          most neutral and descriptive terms I've been able to
          find so far are "gratis OA" and "libre OA", and I've
          decided use them myself until I find better ones. 
          This choice of terms is personal and provisional. 
          But to make it more effective, I wanted to explain it
          in public.
       o "Gratis" and "libre" may not be familiar terms in the
          domain of scholarly communication and OA.  But in the
          neighboring domain of free and open source software,
          they exactly express the distinction I have in  mind.
       o The main point of this table is to show that the
          gratis/libre distinction is not synonymous with the
          green/gold distinction.  The green/gold distinction
          is about venues.  The gratis/libre distinction is
          about user rights or freedoms. 
       o All four cells of the table are non-empty.  Green OA
          can be gratis or libre, and gold OA can be gratis or
          libre. 
       o Libre OA includes or presupposes gratis OA.  But
          neither green nor gold OA presupposes the other,
          although they are entirely compatible and much
          literature is both.
       o All four cells can contain peer-reviewed literature. 
          None of these parameters is about bypassing peer
          review.   
       o Because there are many different permission barriers
          to remove, there many different degrees or kinds of
          libre OA.  Gratis OA is just one thing, but libre OA
          is a range of things. 
       o The BBB definition describes one kind or subset of
          libre OA.  But not all libre OA is BBB OA. 
       o I'm  not proposing a change in the BBB definition,
          and I haven't retreated an inch in my support for
          it.  I'm simply proposing vocabulary to help us talk
          unambiguously about two species of free online
          access.

      This blog post is just a sketch.  For more detail, see
      the full SOAN article.


      Peter Suber
Received on Sat Aug 02 2008 - 18:58:25 BST