Similar to the free content definition, the terms 'gratis' and 'libre' were used in the BOAI definition to distinguish between free to read versus free to reuse.[30] Gratis open access refers to online access free of charge ("free as in beer"), and libre open access refers to online access free of charge plus some additional re-use rights ("free as in freedom").[30] Libre open access covers the kinds of open access defined in the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. The re-use rights of libre OA are often specified by various specific Creative Commons licenses;[31] almost all of these require attribution of authorship to the original authors.[30][32] In 2012, the number of works under libre open access was considered to have been rapidly increasing for a few years, though most open access mandates did not enforce any copyright license and it was difficult to publish libre gold OA in legacy journals.[2] However

, there are no costs nor restrictions for green libre OA as preprints can be freely self-deposited with a free license, and most open access repositories use Creative Commons licenses to allow reuse. The emergence of open science or open research has brought to light a number of controversial and hotly-debated topics.

Scholarly publishing invokes various positions and passions. For example, authors may spend hours struggling with diverse article submission systems, often converting document formatting between a multitude of journal and conference styles, and sometimes spend months waiting for peer review results. The drawn-out and often contentious societal and technological transition to Open Access and Open Science/Open Research, particularly across North America and Europe (Latin America has already widely adopted "Acceso Abierto" since before 2000[38]) has led to increasingly entrenched positions and much debate.