Policy
Open access
The record is free to read, free to cite, and free to teach with. This page states exactly what is open, what it costs to reuse it, and where the machine-readable catalog lives.
Principles
No paywall, no account, no dark archive
Every description, definition, and finding-aid unit is served as public HTML with no registration, no reader account, and no rate gate. If a page needs a login, it is administrative tooling, not archive material.
Attribution is the price
Open does not mean unsourced. Reuse carries the credit line and a link to the unit, because attribution is how the people who did the work stay attached to the record.
Machine-readable by default
The catalog is published as JSON at /catalog.json and as structured data on every route, so libraries, researchers, and answer engines can read the archive without scraping the page layout.
Openness is bounded, and the boundary is written down
Masters, stems, and training corpora stay licensed. Publishing the boundary is part of the policy: nobody has to guess what is free and what is not.
What is open, and on what terms
| Tier | Material | Terms | License |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open — research and reference | Finding aid descriptions, encyclopedia entries, glossary definitions, index, journal research entries, and all catalog metadata. | Free to read, quote, translate, teach with, and republish for non-commercial research, journalism, and classroom use. Attribution required, with a link back to the unit page. | CC BY-NC 4.0 |
| Open with credit line — photography and session stills | Plates published in the photography, field notes, and gallery routes, excluding plates carrying an unverified flag. | Free for editorial, educational, and press use at published resolution with the exact credit line printed on the plate. Print, advertising, and product use requires a written license. | Editorial / educational use, credit required |
| Licensed — masters, stems, and commercial reuse | Multitrack stems, master recordings, unreleased session audio, and any commercial reproduction of archive material. | Not open. Requests are answered in writing, usually within five business days, through the licensing desk. | Written agreement required |
| Licensed — dataset ingestion and model training | Bulk scraping, corpus building, and training of machine-learning systems on any archive text, image, or audio. | Not covered by the open license. The archive licenses training corpora deliberately so that the people in the record are compensated. Ask first. | Written agreement required |
The open license is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International. Full credit lines and per-image attribution live on Credits & licensing.
How to reuse the archive
- 01
Find the unit
Start at the finding aid or the A–Z index. Every described unit has a stable public URL that is safe to cite.
Open the finding aid - 02
Take the citation
Each unit page exports a preferred citation in BibTeX, MLA 9, and Chicago 17 with the canonical URL and access date already filled in.
Browse the index - 03
Pull the machine-readable catalog
Fetch /catalog.json for the full series, unit, and license structure as JSON. No key, no throttle, no scraping required.
View catalog.json - 04
Ask when you cross the line
Commercial reproduction, master or stem use, and model training need a written agreement. The licensing desk answers in writing.
Request a license
Repository of record
The Byron Jupiter Archive holds the physical and digital originals. Reading-room requests, provenance questions, and rights queries route through the same desk that answers licensing.
Cite this unit
@misc{jupiter_open-access_2026,
author = {Jupiter, Jr., Byron L.},
title = {{Open Access Policy}},
howpublished = {The Byron Jupiter Archive, New Orleans, Louisiana},
institution = {The Byron Jupiter Archive},
year = {2026},
url = {https://byronjupiter.com/open-access},
urldate = {2026-01-01},
note = {Accessed 2026-01-01}
}Citations resolve to the canonical URL for this unit. Corrections are dated and published rather than silently amended, so an access date identifies the exact version you read.