Open access: spelling it out

There's open-access. Then there's open access—or more emphatically, Open Access. Other versions include Open Knowledge, Open Science and Open Content. Sometimes you'll see several of these variations on a single web page. The Obama administration, for its part, went with "public access" a couple of weeks ago when it called for free access to research using federal funds.

According to some scholars, the term open access is traceable to the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative, where a small group of Internet philosophers and academics outlined a vision for free online access to peer-reviewed literature. You can read more about this at the University of Washington library's Open Access FAQ. That said, there doesn't seem to be an officially agreed-upon spelling or usage. Both the UW library and the Budapest originators tend to go with the simple lowercase "open access," whereas The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) prefers the linguistically compound "open-access." 

Incidentally, I found this reference to "open-access" by the CMS, which reveals more than just a concern about style. See Section 4.62, "Authors' electronic use of their own works." Apparently, CMS is not much in favor of it, no matter how you spell it, especially where revenue is concerned:

"More problematic is the demand, increasingly frequent, that the author be permitted to post the article on his or her personal website, or on an open-access university website or other 'institutional repository.' While such dissemination may not necessarily affect sales of the journal as such, it is likely to diminish licensing revenues. The fact that licensing revenue helps support the publication of important scholarly work seems to have escaped general notice."  

Read more on the subject of the CMS stance on open access at the blog The Occasional Pamphlet (a fairly old item by Stuart Shieber going back to 2010, but the words live on in the Google-sphere). By the way, Shieber's blog goes both with the dash and without it.