Talk:Open access publishing

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I completely agree (except with the very first sentence) Hopsyturvy (talk) 13:48, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Stevan, I am no longer of the opinion I gave in April. It was suggested to me by that OAP is often used as a synonym for publishing in an OAJ, and that therefore a more general term was needed to encompass the two standard methods--an argument I find quite plausible and that matches yours. Recall that those publishers publishing OA journals or even optional OA Journals refer to themselves as OA Publishers. I've never seen the term used by those who instead permit self-archiving. Nonetheless, open access as such is now an ambiguous word. Looking at recent news stories using it, it seems to be used most by people outside the publishing/librarianship/repository world for equality of access to the hgh speed internet, of the openness of clinical trials for those who wish to enroll. I suggest therefore the following which would avoid all these problems, dividing the material in OAP between the OA and the OAJ article as appropriate, and retitling the present article from OA to OA (publishing). We still need a list of OA Publishers, and that does have to go somewhere. OA Publisher was rejected as a title for this two years ago, but maybe we can try again. As for Peer Review, the current proposal has been to make peer review of scientific grants into a separate article,a the considerations and the literature is quite different from peer review in publishing --or for that matter peer review in academic promotions or evaluation. I think there's an advantage in being specific. While we are both here, what's in your opinion the best generic term for green OA -- "self-archiving" seems wrong for what is usually now mandatory archiving, especially when its organised not by the author but the institution, and institutional repositories are of course not the only way it is done, though of course we know it is your preferred way. DGG (talk) 03:40, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

David, if there is ambiguity among the various senses of OA (countryside, bandwidth, research) then OA could be disambiguated as OA (research), but I think calling it OA (publishing) would be a very bad idea, for the same reasons as above: OA is something that is provided to individual articles, and it can be provided by the publisher (OAP) or the author (OASA). And SA is self-archiving even if the keystrokes are being done by the institution's library and even if the host is a funder repository. There are only two parties that can make an author's own writings OA: the author or the publisher. Let's not conflate this with various inchoate plans to make the author's institution the "copyright holder." Even there, it's the author assigning copyright for his own writing to his own institution (and it's a silly makeshift arrangement anyway -- essentially an attempt to create conditions that make it easier for an author to provide OA to his own writings). The author's own self is the "self" in :self-archiving," If the publisher is not the one making the article OA, then it's the author. That makes it self-archiving, irrespective of the implementational details, either contractual or ergonomic. And it very much needs to be called self-archiving (again, regardless of who is stroking the keys, and regardless of the fact that the author's institution and or funder is mandating that the article be self-archived). The "self" in the self-archiving is not the stroker of the depositing keys, but the one who wrote the article -- as opposed to the one who published it. Otherwise, authors will remain passive, as they are now, imagining that OA to their articles is something that needs to be provided by someone else, other than themselves. Stevan Harnad 02:55, 7 September 2008 (UTC)