Anyone putting a corpus together must define the means of access or consultation.
Corpora can be associated with different means of consultation, ranging from an access restricted to the researcher(s) and those involved in building them, to free access open to the public, notably via the internet. The importance of a precise definitions of means of consultation of a corpus, together with the question of copyright, grew with the use of internet and the ease of sharing and copying that it allows.
Means of corpus consultation should be defined according to ethical criteria first (authorization of recorded participants, sensitive data), scientific and of public interest. They should be distinguished based on four principal types: access blocked (restricted to the creator(s) of the corpus and to the participant(s))/access upon authorization by the person responsible for the corpus/ limited access to a scientific community/ free access to the public. Means of consultation can change over time
Contents validated by Groupe de Travail 4 (multimodality and visual-gestuelle modality)