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.
"Open access" is a social movement outside of Wikipedia. The Open Access Movement suggests that science is improved when scientists have access to research publications. From a Wikipedia perspective, open access is interesting because any Wikipedian can read and reuse open access publications, which is not true of typical publications.
This wording is essentially identical to that of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), which was drafted a little later. For this reason, the fact that some materials are open access according to the definition above could in principle be signaled by some of the icons used for CC BY:
Of course, materials available under CC0 or in the Public Domain would also meet the BOAI definition. Some relevant icons are:
<free_to_read> tag intended to signal whether and when a publication is available publicly without a requirement for payment or registration<license_ref> tag intended to point to a URI containing the licensing terms<readable> tag intended to signal whether a publication is available publicly without a requirement for payment or registration; in contrast to NISO, they do not consider delayed access here, as they handle embargoes differently<license_ref> tag but available in two forms (<rights-xml> and <rights-human-readable>) to cater to machines and humans, respectively.However, these CC BY symbols apply to any materials under that license, so some symbols have been put forward to signal open access more specifically. The one shown here in particular has found broad traction (for instance, it features in almost any materials related to Open Access Week), but amidst considerable confusion of terminology, it has increasingly been used in the sense of free to read (example) rather than the more comprehensive set of use and reuse rights laid out by BOAI and CC BY. Color variants exist (see below). A less popular icon with similar ambiguity is at de:Datei:Open access.svg. As an alternative, ⓐ has been proposed (a slightly more open variant of which is in use with that very meaning of BOAI compliance here). Another alternative could be a combination of a look icon with an icon depicting some document, as in this slide.
Much of the debates around open access are framed in terms of Green vs. Gold, which boils down to whether the paper is available from the publisher (Gold) or from another place (Green). In current practice, neither of the two guarantees CC BY. To make things worse, a number of resources use completely different color codes - for instance, most of what would be "Gold" in the sense from above is Green in the sense of SHERPA/RoMEO, which also has blue, white and yellow to signal the availability of pre-or postprints, irrespective of licensing.
Some libraries, on the other hand (Regensburg example; there are also Unicode characters 🚥 and 🚦), use green to indicate to a user of their online catalogs that they have full-text access to the journal, red that they do not have access to the journal, and yellow if full-text access is available for some issues of the journal.
There are color variants of the above-mentioned orange lock icon, e.g. a blue one (usage example), or purple. Inverted colors (e.g. as in this Twitter avatar) could also be an option.
In principle, each and every use and reuse right could be signaled independently by dedicated icons, e.g. the icon pictured here could stand for an item that is free to read. Then, there would be several essential icons that would be needed to signal BOAI compliance (i.e. CC BY) - at least one for reuse (but that might have to be split into the different kinds of reuse listed in the BOAI definition), and perhaps one specifically for reuse by machines (i.e. crawling, text mining). The more icons we use, the higher is the potential for confusion amongst readers.
There are several ways in which OA-ness is currently being signaled on the English Wikipedia:
) or media files associated with the article are available from Wikimedia Commons (
) using the existing templates {{Commons category-inline}} and {{cite wikisource}} (or perhaps {{Wikisource-inline}} or {{Wikisourcehas}}) or more minimalistic variations thereof.
Q15625490 Media related to Williams et al. 2010 at Wikimedia Commons
{{citation}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)). Example: d:Q1895685There are a number of articles on the Dutch Wikipedia that have statements like "Dit is een open access artikel, beschikbaar onder de licentie Creative Commons Naamsvermelding (CC-BY; versie 2.0)."
or 
), i.e. there is no requirement for attribution. This is not the case for the Creative Commons icons.A repository has been set up at https://github.com/wpoa/OA-signalling to host all software related to this project.
The following individuals and organizations are expected to be helpful to moving this project forward. They will be invited to consult and get involved in implementing a pilot program.