Generalizing The "Gratis/Libre" Distinction To The Open Access Movement
The original Gratis/Libre distinction concerns software (i.e., code), with which users can potentially do two kinds of things: (1) access and use it and (2) modify and re-use it. "Gratis" pertains to being able to access and use the code, without a price-barrier, and "Libre" pertains to being allowed to modify and re-use the code, without a permission barrier. The target content of the Open Access movement, however, is not software but published, peer-reviewed research journal article texts.
1. Code (text) accessibility and use. For published research articles, the case for making their text accessible free for all online (Gratis) is even stronger than it is for software code, because in the case of software, some developers may wish to give their code away for free, while others may wish to sell it, whereas in the case of published research article texts, all their authors, without exception, give them away for free: None seek or get royalties or fees from their sale. On the contrary, any access-denial to potential users means loss of potential research impact (downloads, citations) for the author's research—and researcher-authors' employment, salary, promotion and funding depends in part on the uptake and impact of their research. So whereas not all programmers may want their software to be accessible Gratis, all researchers want their articles to be accessible Gratis.
2. Code (text) modifiability and re-use. For published research articles, the case for allowing text modification and re-use is much weaker than for software code, because, unlike software, the text of a research article is not intended for modification and re-use. (In contrast, the content of research articles is and always was intended for modification and re-use: that is how research progresses.) There are no copyright barriers to modifying, developing, building upon and re-using an author's ideas and findings, once they have been published, as long as the author and published source are credited—but modifications to the published text are another matter. Apart from verbatim quotation, scholarly/scientific authors are not in general interested in allowing other authors to create "Mashups" of their texts. Researcher-authors are all happy to make their texts available for harvesting and indexing for search as well as data-mining, but not for re-use in altered form (without the permission of the author).
The formal analogy, and the generalization of the Gratis/Libre distinction from Open Software to Open access (publishing), have been made. However, because of the substantive disanalogies regarding (1) and (2) noted above, the analogy needs to be treated with some caution.
Read more about this topic: Gratis Versus Libre
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