Dear Matt,
I certainly don't want to compete for priority for such a banal thing
as the name coined to designate toll-free online access, but I am
surprised by your suggestion that PLoS or BMC had coined OA before
BOAI! Jan Velterop of BMC and Mike Eisen of PLoS were there at the
Budapest meeting in December 2001, and part of the drafting group that
coined the term "Open Access" in the December-February drafting period,
but I don't recall any suggestion that the term already existed and
was in use. (That doesn't mean it wasn't, of course; indeed, it's almost
certain that others -- including electricity grid and telephone companies,
had been using "open access" in other senses before.)
I have checked my archive of the drafting of the BOAI, and I note that Peter
already used the term "Open access" in his first draft of December 6 2001,
4 days after the Budapest meeting. I also vaguely remember that we
deliberately chose "Open Access Initiative" in order to resonate with the
"Open Archives Initiative," which had already generated the all-important
OAI metadata harvesting protocol, and the very notion of interoperable
"Open Archives" that, along with the Internet itself, is what made OA
possible.
There is also an archive of the moment when the Open Archives Initiative
first settled on "Open Archives" (in place of "UPS") in 1999 (the term
was coined by Herbert van de Sompel).
Peter: Do you have a better recollection of how we settled on OA, and when?
Was it perhaps during the Budapest meeting itself? (Perhaps Jan and Mike
can recall?)
It's probably of some (minor) historic interest how "OA" came to be called
OA.
Chrs, Stevan
On Fri, 30 Jun 2006, Matthew Cockerill wrote:
> The Budapest meeting no doubt helped the term 'open access' to
> achieve wide currency, and provided a definition for it.
>
> But, for what it's worth, the Internet Archive confirms that the term
> open access was already being used in early 2001 by BioMed Central
> (amongst others?) to describe:
> (a) journals
> http://web.archive.org/web/20010307122249/www.biomedcentral.com/
> 1472-2091/1/2
> (b) PubMed Central
> http://web.archive.org/web/20010405071619/www.biomedcentral.com/info/
> whatis.asp
>
>
> I'm with Humpty Dumpty on this one though:
> http://sundials.org/about/humpty.htm
>
> Matt
>
>
>
>
> On 30 Jun 2006, at 0:15, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>
> > Rick Anderson is unhappy with "my" definition of OA:
> >
> >
> >>>>> SH:
> >>>>> OA means free online access to published, peer-reviewed journal
> >>>>> articles.
> >>>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> RA:
> >>>> No, Stevan, that's _your_ definition of OA. It is by no means the
> >>>> only one.
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>> SH:
> >>> No, Rick, that's the BOAI definition, and that was where the
> >>> word OA was coined:
> >>> http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
> >>>
> >>
> >> RA:
> >> Actually, the Barcelona definition departs significantly from
> >> Stevan's.
> >> It does not require content to be either peer-reviewed or formally
> >> published in order for it to be considered OA, nor does it share
> >> Stevan's narrow focus on self-archiving. More significantly, the
> >> BOAI
> >> definition is itself not the only one.
> >>
> >
> > To repeat, the term "Open Access" was introduced into the language
> > between December 2001 and February 2002 by the co-drafters of the
> > Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) (Peter Suber, principal
> > drafter).
> >
> > Language being what it is, once coined, the term was of course free
> > to take on any other meaning anyone wished to assign to it, but
> > there is much to be said for the co-drafters' original intention
> > and initiative: It was, after all, what launched the Open Access
> > movement.
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Received on Fri Jun 30 2006 - 13:56:56 BST