1. The Open Access movement has been characterized by a common objective—namely Open Access to peer-reviewed, scholarly articles—and a dual strategy to attain this objective. See the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) published on the Web on February 14, 2002, http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml. To qualify as Open Access, a document must follow two different sets of conditions that were clearly outlined in the Bethesda declaration, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm#note1. (1) The user is granted a number of rights (e.g., “a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit, and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works”); (2) the document must be archived “in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access”; these are the exact words of the Bethesda Statement on Open Access. They refine and elaborate upon the definition that emerged with BOAI. The Public Library of Science endorses the Bethesda definition of Open Access (see http://www.plos.org/about/openaccess.html)
2. This “reader pays” phraseology is as inaccurate as the “author pays” expression. Later in this text, we shall speak about a “subsidized author.”
3. This is, at best, shorthand for journals deriving their income at the point of production and not at the point of sale. Effectively, the point of sale disappears with Open Access. Someone, perhaps a granting agency, a foundation, a research institution, or even in some rare cases, an author, pays the publishing fee set up by the publisher. A better expression would be “paid on behalf of the author,” which is accurate but a little unwieldy. Perhaps a “subsidized author” would foot the bill and provide a nice parallel for the “subsidized reader” expression used later on.
4. In India, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, etc. See notes 47–52.
5. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~Harnad/Temp/self-archiving.ppt, slide 47. Specifically, Harnad writes: “Open access through author/institution self-archiving is a parallel self-help measure for researchers, to prevent further impact-loss now. Open access is a supplement to toll-access, but not necessarily a substitute for it.” Note the reference to “impact-loss.” This is really a “manque-à-gagner” (loss of possible gains) rather than a direct loss. What Harnad means to say is not that impact already gained is going to be lost; it is that impact that might be added to already gained impact is not being added. What he really meant to write is that self-archiving is a self-help measure to open up the possibility of further impact gains.