We allow you to assign an Open Access license to works, and to specify that products are free. If a work is Open Access and the product is free, an OA license is assigned to the product. However a product can be free without being Open Access, and a product can have no price specified. Confused? Read on.

Open Access Products

In Consonance a product is Open Access if two conditions are met. Firstly, you must specify for the work a suitable license type, and Consonance allows you to specify one of twelve different CreativeCommons licenses.

  • CC BY 3.0 Unported
  • CC BY-NC 3.0 Unported
  • CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 Unported
  • CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported
  • CC BY-ND 3.0 Unported
  • CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported
  • CC BY 4.0 International
  • CC BY-NC 4.0 International
  • CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
  • CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International
  • CC BY-ND 4.0 International
  • CC BY-SA 4.0 International

Secondly, the individual OA products on the work must be free (see below). When you choose any of these licenses, all free products for that work are assigned the appropriate Open Access license in ONIX. If you publish only particular formats, such as a PDF or online HTML, as Open Access, specify an Open Access license for the work, and then ensure that the OA products are free of charge using one of the following methodologies.

Free-of-charge products

There are two ways to indicate that a product in Consonance is free. 1 Specifying only prices of zero for it. 2 Specifying that the unpriced products on the work are all free. However, note that in the ONIX standard a price of zero is not valid. Instead a code is added to the product’s supply details that indicates that it is free.

Unpriced products

A product can be unpriced in ONIX, which is regarded as a different status to being free.

In fact, a product can be flagged as unpriced in ONIX even if it has a price, under the particular circumstances. This follows from the ONIX structure, in which the product’s price is always associated with a supplier (such as a distributor or wholesaler).

Specify rules that associate suppliers only with particular product types. For example, you might have a supplier of eBooks to libraries in the US market, and this supplier uses a USD Library price. If a product does not have a USD Library price, either deliberately or through accidental omission, then the supplier configuration results in no price being available, and the supply is then assigned a code in ONIX that means Contact the supplier to find out the price.