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.