There are some Harnad-spread dogmatic misunderstandings of Open Access.
"Establishing open access as a worthwhile procedure ideally requires
the active commitment of each and every individual producer of
scientific knowledge and holder of cultural heritage. Open access
contributions include original scientific research results, raw data
and metadata, source materials, digital representations of pictorial
and graphical materials and scholarly multimedia material." (Berlin
Declaration)
Therefore it is wrong to define OA as access to scholarly literature.
Open Access also concerns cultural heritage. My suggestion for the
Wikipedia article is:
Open Access (scholarly movement)
Klaus Graf
2010/5/19 Marc Couture <jaamcouture_at_gmail.com>:
> 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 - 16:07:56 BST