Barbara (aka Ept) wrote: > > I do not understand the phrase 'Open Access Publishing'. Open access is about 'access'. > It is not a publishing process. The title should refer to 'open access journals'. The use of the > phrase 'OA publishing' reinforces the idea that OA is about publishing and this is one reason > why 'OA repositories' are often left out of the equation. With the title provided it is unlikely that > anyone will think it is about OA repositories. >
The problem with this title is that both its constituent parts ("open access" and "publishing") can have more or less general meanings, as all discussions like this one clearly illustrate. Does Open Access mean only toll-free access, or does it imply some user rights? Does Open Access apply only to articles published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, or to all types of scholarly literature (articles, conference papers, monographs, etc.), peer-reviewed or not? Or even to all kinds of works, scholarly or not? Does "publishing" mean that there must be a third party (a "publisher") giving access to the work, or can an author publish her own works (as in "vanity publishing")? Does posting on the Web constitute publishing? (Yes, according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishing, but can one trust it?). My understanding, after years of reading about this topic, is that Open Access can be best described as "toll-free access to published scholarly literature", where "published" has the meaning generally recognized in the scholarly universe, as in "publish or perish". As far as I can tell, "Open Access" is not used in conjunction with other types of freely available works, like novels or music. And while it's generally advocated, granting user rights is not necessary to earn the label (for instance, many journals listed in DOAJ don't do it, even if it is explicitly required for appearing in the list). Thus defined, OA includes much more than journals (for instance repository-based Green-OA as envisioned by Harnad), while clearly excluding all kinds of vanity publishing (unrefereed preprint self-archiving, blogging, etc.). So, a more appropriate title could be "Open Access (to published scholarly literature)", but I agree with Harnad that it would be better to stick with simply "Open Access", and define it at the onset of the article along the lines I propose above. But, if one is to learn from Harnad's experience with Wikipedia, I'm not sure I wish to do the test... Marc Couture