If weak OA is truly “removal of price barriers alone”
(as stated on this page), then weak OA is really
just “free”. Nothing more. “Free” is a perfectly
fine word to describe it, so why use another word?

The intent of “open”, as far as I have always been
able to tell, is to mean “may be redistributed with
no barriers or requirements other than attribution”.

By the way, do you think PubMed Central is open?
If so, think again, and read the fine print on
their web site. It’s free, not open, despite
their claims of no barriers on their home page.

But since Peter and I agreed on the distinction, and agreed that both price-barrier-free access and permission-barrier-free access are indeed open access, our colleagues have been contacting us to express concern about the unintended pejorative connotations of “weak.”

As a consequence, to avoid this unanticipated and inadvertent bias, the two types of OA cannot be named by the logical conditions (weak and strong) that define them. We will soon announce a more transparent, unbiased pair of names. Current candidates include:

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 OA vs. EXTENDED or FULL OA

SOFT OA vs. HARD OA

EASY OA vs. HARD OA

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

Stevan Harnad