Editorial commentary
Free to read (also called gratis open access) means the full text of a published article is accessible online at no cost to the reader — no subscription, paywall, or per-article fee. It is a narrower guarantee than open access under an open license: free to read says nothing, by itself, about whether a reader may reuse, adapt, redistribute, or build on the text beyond reading it. Where a free-to-read article is also released under an explicit open license (most commonly a Creative Commons license such as CC BY), it is described as libre open access, which additionally removes copyright barriers to modifying, developing, and re-using the author’s ideas and findings, provided the original author and source are credited.
What it does not guarantee
Being free to read does not by itself mean an article is text-and-data-mining friendly, translatable, or reusable in a derivative work without separate permission — those rights depend on the license actually attached, not on the price to the reader. It is also distinct from green open access, which describes self-archiving a version of the article (often the accepted manuscript) in a repository, sometimes after an embargo, independent of whether the publisher’s own version of record is free to read.
How publishers signal it
NISO’s Access and License Indicators (ALI) recommended practice defines a formal free_to_read metadata element that publishers can attach to an article’s record — including a start date and, where relevant, an end date — so that discovery systems, aggregators, and services like Crossref can programmatically distinguish free-to-read content (including temporarily free promotional access) from content genuinely under an open license. This is a metadata signal, not a legal license in itself.
In practice
Publishers of gold open-access articles under an article publication charge model typically make the article both free to read and libre (openly licensed) at the same time, but the two guarantees are logically separate, and a research office assessing a funder’s open-access mandate should check which one the mandate actually requires — many funder mandates now specify a license (e.g., CC BY), not merely free-to-read status.
Also known as
without a price-barrier · without a permission barrier
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Free to read"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/free-to-read" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/free-to-read",
"name": "Free to read",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/free-to-read",
"description": "Free to read (gratis open access) means the full text of a published article can be read online at no cost to the reader, with no requirement that it also carry an open license permitting reuse — a narrower guarantee than open access under a Creative Commons license.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/knowledge-equity#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/free-to-read",
"alternateName": [
"without a price-barrier",
"without a permission barrier"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-19T19:11:44",
"dateModified": "2026-09-05T17:30:15",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
