Open Access

Open Access Anne Shelley (bio) and Rachel E. Scott (bio) A variety of Open Access (OA) initiatives and models have emerged since the movement gained momentum at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Defined by Peter Suber as "digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions," OA continues to evolve and grow in complexity.1 Suber's definition underlines the two primary facets of OA: it is gratis, or free to read, and libre, free of copyright restrictions. The gratis aspect of OA is more apparent than the libre, leading to some confusion and inconsistent use of the phrase. Occasionally OA is used to describe publicly or freely available content irrespective of copyright or licensing restrictions. In this essay, we offer foundational definitions and explore several themes related to OA resources, music scholarship, and music librarianship. open access music scholarship Open Access publishing is most commonly associated with scholarly journal articles. It has proliferated inconsistently throughout music scholarship, with some subdisciplines quickly embracing it and others holding fast to traditional publishing models. Although many music scholars positively perceive the opportunities OA holds to democratize reading, others have cast doubt on the extent to which OA models truly foster equitable and global dialogue.2 Open Access is attended by a variety of funding and publishing models that have implications for implementation and sustainability. Gold OA requires the payment of an article processing charge (APC) or other publication fee to the publisher. Under gold OA, the author retains copyright and can choose their licensing terms and the article is free to read with no embargo. Diamond OA, also referred to as platinum or non-commercial OA, similarly allows the author to retain copyright and provides gratis and embargo-free access to article. Instead of charging article authors, their institution, or funder an APC, however, diamond OA is funded at the journal level, most often by non-profit [End Page 241] organizations. Green OA allows the author to deposit a specified version of the article (whether pre-review, post-review, or the version of record) in specified repositories without payment but does not necessarily stipulate copyright or licensing terms. Green OA intersects with what has been called gray OA or academic social networks (e.g., ResearchGate and Academia.edu), somewhat hazy options by which scholarly content is often made available regardless of the publisher's terms.3 Music theory has led the way in adopting not only OA publishing, but also open peer-review and open data practices. The Society for Music Theory, for example, has three diamond OA publications—Music Theory Online, SMT-V, and SMT-POD—all of which are free to read and do not charge authors fees to publish. By espousing openness, music theory has demonstrated that prestigious publishing venues and OA need not be mutually exclusive. Most primary society journals and other esteemed publication venues in music, however, remain behind a paywall with limited OA options. Participants in a recent study identified musicology as the most conservative subfield within music and the one in which OA has made the least progress.4 The American Musicological Society publishes its flagship journal behind a paywall and makes its pedagogical and experimental journals available OA.5 The Society for Ethnomusicology paywalls their flagship journal Ethnomusicology through the Scholarly Publishing Collective. The society recently added the peer-reviewed, OA Journal of Audiovisual Ethnomusicology, which suggests a willingness to support open models outside of their flagship. Both societies' flagship journals allow for the Green OA deposit of a version of the article in an approved repository. Given the significant overlap with disciplines in the social and hard sciences, music cognition and music education journals frequently offer APC-based OA models. In music education, for example, there are several journals published by Sage and Taylor & Francis that are hybrid OA—a model in which the payment of an APC will make an individual article Gold OA. The National Association for Music Education's Society for Research in Music Education, for example, publishes The Journal of Research in Music Education with Sage behind a paywall, but accommodates both Gold and Green OA. [End Page 242] Despite articulating support for...