Heather Morrison wrote:
>
> Could it be that Wikipedia needs a way to disambiguate the term "open
> access"?
>
The page titled "Open Access" (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access) is
indeed a disambiguation page, leading to several other pages, among them:
- "Open Access (publishing)", whose title is being discussed in this forum;
- "Open Access journal", which has a significant overlap with the former and
opens with a suggestion that both be merged, a matter of sometimes heated
discussion in the Talk pages of both articles.
>
> One suggestion would be open access to scholarly works. There likely is
better
> phrasing, this is just to give an idea.
>
I had thought of "Open Access (published scholarly literature)" because what is
at issue is not access to "personal", unrefereed documents or works (which is
normally open) but to (normally refereed) documents are counted as
"publications" in the scholarly universe. One could think also of "Open Access
to scholarly publications", which is shorter and carry the same meaning.
I was about to make this change in Wikipedia, when I read their page about
article titles (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_titles and
decided to follow their advice :
"Debating controversial titles is often unproductive, and there are many other
ways to help improve Wikipedia."
So I will instead try to improve the content of the articles instead of joining
the kind of guerrilla, well documented in the Talk page, regarding this
particular issue. Doing so, I aim to contribute to increasing the reliability of
Wikipedia, whatever that reliability may be at the moment (by the way, though
I'm highly interested in all things Wikipedia, I will refrain from discussing
"Wikipedia ideology rather than OA pragmatics", following Harna's dutiful
suggestion).
Marc Couture
Received on Wed May 19 2010 - 15:06:22 BST