position and the position of the existing library subscription model. This illustrates the danger of trying to let commercial interests shape the direction of openness. Before we consider this, however, let us look first at how open access publishing has been so successful.
The Success of Open Access
Open Access publishing began in the 1990s, as we have seen, taking its inspiration from open source communities, and also by realising that digital, networked content changed the nature of publication. Open Access is usually interpreted to mean ‘free online access to scholarly works’, although the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) gives a more formal definition, which encompasses not only free access in terms of cost, but free from copyright constraints also:
By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its 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. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
This echoes the distinction between free cost and free reuse that Stallman sought to make with regards to software. While the definition of open access is not as contentious as other terms we
