Interesting discussion - thanks to all who have joined in so far!
So far, we have covered the perspectives of readers, Wikipedians, OA advocates (in whatever form) and librarians.
Now let's think about implementation: what sources are available to gather the information whether some reference falls into one of our classes that we want to signal?
Of course, we could have a bot follow all the links provided with references, and whenever it hits a paywall, mark things as paywalled. But what if there is a non-paywalled version out there, how are we going to find it? Yes, Google Scholar has much of that information, but they do not allow systematic querying. And even if the bot (or someone) finds a copy somewhere, how do we know that it is legally up there? And for how long? Or, conversely, if we don't find anything now, perhaps an embargo is over somewhen down the line, and maybe someone will post the thing somewhere then - should we chase for these? And what about different file formats? JMIR, for instance, offers HTML for free (CC BY) but charges for PDF. Nature offers XML for "free to read by machines" but charges for PDF and HTML. How do we go about that?
Those kinds of problems do not occur if we just stick to labelling stuff that has a CC license associated with it in trusted sources of metadata (like DOAJ or CrossRef). The rest is (to be) covered by the OA button approach, a representation of which should ultimately be part of our signalling scheme.
The next question, then, would be whether we go for "any CC license" or some subset thereof for the part that we implement ourselves. I agree that most readers don't care, while many Wikimedians do, and I think we should cater to both groups. This could be achieved in multiple ways, e.g. by having a free to read icon on Wikipedia and some representation of the licensing on Wikidata (once we have individual references represented there).
On the other hand, a signalling of OA-ness on Wikipedia should not be seen in isolation of the same thing being signalled elsewhere - be it in repositories or on the pages of publishers, on blogs or on the homepages of researchers. If all of these places were to use a certain signal to convey the meaning of "free to read" (in fact, many use the orange open lock icon for that), we are a small step ahead of a system in which readers always have to find out by themselves whether they can read something or not.
If, on the other hand, we can agree on what precisely we mean by OA, then a layer of tools and services (or "apps", if you prefer) could be build on top of that - just imagine an "import this image to X" button associated with images in places like PubMed Central or even at publishers (X, btw, could be Wikimedia Commons, or a blog, or an OER), or authors proudly displaying stats of the GLAMorous kind (cf. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Media_from_highly_reused_open-ac... ) in their lists of publications. If we go for anything here that includes -NC clauses, nobody other than the copyright holders could make money off those apps, while -ND stuff could not be edited, so it would not fit a wiki environment. This leaves us with Commons-compatible licenses, and considering that there are almost no scholarly papers licensed CC BY-SA, going for CC BY compatibility would not be a problem (a quick Google search on PubMed Central currently lists 13 articles under CC BY-SA, at least some of which - including one of mine - are false positives that talk about that license, rather than being licensed that way: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fpmc+%22http%3A... ).
So I imagine that we signal the following: - initially, just" CC BY compatibility" (either through the CC BY icon or some non-orange version of the open lock - my favourite would be blue as in http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bha.2114 or https://twitter.com/OpenAccessEC ). Not sure whether CC0/PD stuff should be signalled separately - probably yes if we go for a CC BY icon before, perhaps not if we go for something else, e.g. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sz%C3%A9chenyi_l%C3%A1nch%C3%ADd_in_... ). - once this works, we could also signal "free to read" for stuff that is under other CC licenses (e.g. via a book icon; this may cause confusion, though, in the sense that some may believe that CC BY means not free to read, at least if we do not also use the free to read icon alongside the CC BY icon) - in the long run, references not being labelled by any of the two above would get a representation of the OA button's score (or whatever they have then) for that article (which may include a signal that some "free to read" version is available).
so long,
d.
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 11:36 PM, Stuart Lawson stuart.a.lawson@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Bob, that's an important point and one that has been thought about. Green open access and Gold open access are jargon terms for self-archiving and open access journal publishing respectively, and these colour attributes are merely abstract (and admittedly potentially misleading) terms and they wouldn't be represented in any logos/symbols that we might choose.
The orange symbol is the one from PLOS that has become a fairly standard symbol of open access (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Open_Access_PLoS.svg). Its important feature is that it is an /open/ lock. You're right that for good accessibility online, colour should not be the only factor to distinguish between logos. This is a part of the reason why we're likely to choose an open lock/closed lock combination, with colour as a secondary distinguishing feature.
There's an example here of how they might look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Open_Access/Signalling_O.... I hope that's adequate for people who are colourblind. I'm not sure how those logos would manifest for people with further visual impairments, but the text of the template/tags (in this example) uses the words 'open access' and 'closed access' respectively. If anything more needs to be done I'm sure we can work it out before implementing whichever system is finally decided on.
Thanks, Stuart
On 10 September 2013 22:14, Bob Kosovsky bobkosovsky@nypl.org wrote:
I'm quietly watching the discussion and have been wondering whether anyone has thought about people with disabilities. Green, gold, orange, etc....can a colorblind (or fully blind) person see these distinctions? I'm not an expert in web design, but I believe that web designers are told to stay away from depending on color alone to guide users.
Isn't it important to be able to provide open access to those for whom much of the world is particularly closed?
Bob Kosovsky, Ph.D. -- Curator, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Music Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts blog: http://www.nypl.org/blog/author/44 Twitter: @kos2 Listowner: OPERA-L ; SMT-TALK ; SMT-ANNOUNCE ; SoundForge-users
- My opinions do not necessarily represent those of my institutions -
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Stuart Lawson stuart.a.lawson@gmail.com wrote:
I agree that it's best to leave aside green/gold distinctions. It seems like there is only one central thing that we're debating here, and that's whether or not to have two separate symbols for 'free-to-read' and 'open access'. The three-symbol pay-read-reuse structure does make a lot of sense, but Andrew's concerns are valid.
Does anyone else reading this have a strong feeling either way? It would be good to get more opinions. To that end, would it be useful to create a summary of the debate and post it/advertise it more widely within Wikipedia (or has that already been done, besides the Signalling OA-ness page)?
Stuart
On 10 September 2013 19:38, Jake Orlowitz jorlowitz@gmail.com wrote:
My concern is that we are still providing a service to our readers, who want to know what they can do with a source? Do they have to pay to see it, or can they just click through and read it? That's their primary concern: can they read it. The second issue is whether the source is free for reuse in the libre sense. We want to signal that because we do want to highlight those sources, I think. I'm not sure I see how green and gold fit into this, as they don't necessarily impact the pay-read-reuse structure. Green articles may not be free to reuse, and same with Gold while a Gold article may be free to reuse while a green may not. So I think that's a side issue that we're actually not wading into with the pay-read-reuse structure. And I agree we shouldn't weigh into that broader debate as it's very much still up in the air.
On 9/10/13, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
On 10 September 2013 17:15, Stuart Lawson stuart.a.lawson@gmail.com wrote:
Okay. That might work. I can see that it's best for the orange lock to be associated only with 'true' open access with re-use rights.
Andrew and I have been talking about whether these symbols might be more broadly used than for journal articles/scholarly content. For example, a paywalled newpaper article might be marked up with the closed symbol and a free-to-read newspaper article with a book icon (if we were to go with the proposed three symbols). Is this something we need to think about?
I did a bit more thinking about this today. It's a fun question, but probably a distraction for now ;-)
Some - hopefully more structured - thoughts on the icons
Firstly, there is clearly some kind of fuzzy difference between a newspaper article which is free-to-read and a self-archived journal article which is free-to-read - one is business as usual, one is open access. My questioning suggests people find it hard to draw the line, but we can all agree on roughly where to draw it. Let's assume for the moment that we're going to talk about explicitly "academic" material and leave everything else unmarked. ;-)
Secondly, there is certainly a valid distinction to be made between gold OA and green OA, or OA tied to specific forms of licensing versus purely "free to read". However, I think saying that one is _defined_ as "open access" and the other is not, and using WP as a position from which to do this labelling, is a problematic move. We would be taking a clear position in an active and ongoing debate about the nature and meaning of OA, and - personally - I'm not even sure we'd be taking the right side.
Thirdly, I still think that visually distinguishing between "free content" and "free to read" in links is ultimately not a productive activity. It's negative because takes up our time; it increases the cognitive burden on readers who now have to juggle a third symbol; and it makes an (admittedly inoffensive) gesture towards "rewarding" content we like by highlighting it. By comparison, the positive benefits seem very limited - a small number of readers who understand and care about free content get a piece of information that should, hopefully, be clear if they follow the link anyway.
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