Open access: Strong vs. weak? Not so fast.

May 7, 2008 | 5:30 am

The movement to allow free, unfettered access to scientific results is moving along so fast, it’s hard to keep track. As I wrote last fall in symmetry, it began 50 years ago when particle physicists started circulating mimeographed preprints of their work, and got a big boost in 1991 with the establishment of an Internet clearinghouse, now called arXiv, for posting results, often before they’re published. Today there are more than 3000 journals across a wide range of fields that allow some form of open access.

Advocates divide open access into two general forms, green and gold. From my symmetry article:

The green road is what physicists have been doing all along-making their work available on the Web, whether on a central repository such as arXiv or on their own home pages. Activists would like to spread these practices to other fields. .. Under the gold model, journals make their contents available free, with the cost of publishing generally paid by authors or by their home institutions. Unlike the green road, it explicitly provides a way to pay for peer review. In physics, gold journals include Advances in High Energy Physics and the recently launched PMC Physics A, which posts articles in a way that also allows readers to access and manipulate the underlying data… A growing number of journals are hybrids: They continue to sell subscriptions, but will make individual articles available free online if the author pays a fee. This model was pioneered by Springer in 2004.

Now two leaders of the movement, Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad, are calling for a second set of terms to describe another distinction: information that is available for free versus information that not only is free, but also can be used without special permission. The technical terms are “price-barrier-free OA” and “permission-barrier-free OA,” but they’d like to replace those with something less technical.

The distinction is not as simple as, say, paper versus plastic, because one is contained within the other; information that can be used without permission is also generally available without charge. What’s more, obtaining free access to information is considered an important step toward the ultimate goal of full, unfettered access. So it’s more like plain tea vs. tea with lots of cream and sugar.

Last week, Suber wrote in his Open Access News blog that he and Harnad had agreed on the terms “weak” OA, meaning you don’t have to pay for it, and “strong OA,” meaning you don’t have to get permission to use it, either.

We agree that weak OA is often attainable in circumstances when strong OA is not attainable. We agree that weak OA should not be delayed until we can achieve strong OA. We agree that strong OA is a desirable goal above and beyond weak OA. We agree that the desirability of strong OA is a reason to keep working after attaining weak OA, but not a reason to disparage the difficulties or the significance of weak OA.

Reaction was swift. By Saturday, they had abandoned that position and launched a search for more “value-neutral” terms.

Harnad wrote:

In particular, Professor Bernard Rentier, the Rector of the University of Liege (which has adopted a Green OA self-archiving mandate to provide price-barrier-free OA) is also the founder of EurOpenScholar, which is dedicated to promoting the adoption of Green OA mandates in the universities of Europe and worldwide. Professor Rentier advised us quite explicitly that if price-boundary-free OA were called “Weak OA,” it would make it much harder to persuade other rectors to adopt Green OA mandates–purely because of the negative connotations of “weak.”

And:

The ultimate choice of names matters far less than ensuring that the unintended connotations of “weak” cannot be exploited by the opponents of OA, or by the partisans of one of the forms of OA to the detriment of the other. Nor should mandating “weak OA” be discouraged by the misapprehension that it is some sort of sign of weakness, or of a deficient desideratum

So it’s back to the drawing board. Suber and Harnad do have a list of alternative terms:

Transparent, self-explanatory descriptors:

USE OA vs. RE-USE OA
READ OA vs. READ-WRITE OA
PRICE OA vs. PERMISSION OA

Generic descriptors:

BASIC or GENERIC or CORE OA vs. EXTENDED or EXTENSIBLE or FULL OA
SOFT OA vs. HARD OA
EASY OA vs. HARD OA

The discussion continues on American Scientist Open Access Forum, where Harnad has asked people to send suggestions his way so he can tally and post them.

Glennda Chui
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