Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad have been trying to clarify the different meanings of the term “Open Access.” Recently, these two advocates of the OA cause issued a joint statement which began as follows:

The term “open access” is now widely used in at least two senses. For some, “OA” literature is digital, online, and free of charge. It removes price barriers but not permission barriers. For others, “OA” literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions. It removes both price barriers and permission barriers. It allows reuse rights which exceed fair use.

Suber and Harnad proposed using “weak OA” to describe the former kind, literature which is “price-barrier-free,” and “strong OA” for the latter, “permission-barrier-free” variety. Shortly thereafter, however, people got flustered and pointed out that “weak OA” is unnecessarily pejorative. After all, even lowering price barriers is a good thing, and there’s no reason to make life harder for the people trying to do that. Better terminology is needed. This is a chance for all you aspiring wordanistas to lead your very own revolution! (Given the audience which finds OA issues of interest, your revolution will be well-blogged, but not televised.) Can you come up with a better alternative than the current options like “Basic OA” versus “Full OA”?

Hopefully, whatever terms we end up using to denote these gradations in scale will be more illuminating than the ones employed by the US Post Office. Every time I walk in to post something, I find myself befuddled by Express, Priority and First-Class designations: which one is actually the fastest and the most expensive? When each term is tarted up to sound as exciting as possible, their ability to indicate a scale of any kind is ruined.