Stevan Harnad in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
On Sat, 15 May 2010, Barbara Kirsop [Electronic Publishing Trust for Development] wrote:
What is very confusing about [the SAGE survey's] call for feedback is the title ["Open Access Publishing"]. http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/soap_survey_a
I do not understand the phrase 'Open Access Publishing'. Open access is about 'access'. It is not a publishing process. The title should refer to 'open access journals'. The use of the phrase 'OA publishing' reinforces the idea that OA is about publishing and this is one reason why 'OA repositories' are often left out of the equation. With the title provided it is unlikely that anyone will think it is about OA repositories.
Those I respect in the OA world tell me I am being pedantic, but it is little things like this that cause confusion to newcomers to the debate. I make a plea that we stop using the phrase 'open access publishing' and use 'open access journals' or 'the publishing of open access journals' instead!
Dear Barbara, you are in no way being pedantic!
You are quite right that the relentless (and mindless) tendency to refer to (and think of) OA itself as "OA Publishing" instead of just OA (thereby completely conflating and confusing Green OA self-archiving with Gold OA publishing) has been an endless source of misunderstanding, misdirection and, worst of all, delay in the progress of OA.
A high-profile accomplice in the perpetuation of this constant canard is the entry for "Open Access" in Wikipedia, Google's ubiquitous "top hit" (hence always the top hit for "Open Access" queries).
Originally the Wikipedia entry was entitled "Open Access," as it should be. But then some of the self-appointed vigilantes ("trolls") in the bowels of Wikipedia -- mostly anonymous individuals with plenty of time on their hands who accrue the "power" to adjudicate and legislate Wikipedia items and disputes not through expertise in the subject matter but "recursively," through cumulative air-time in adjudicating and legislating! -- decided to rename the entry "Open Access (publishing)." So there you are.
Why did they do it? It's Wikipedia's usual fetish, which is that "notability" -- perhaps "notoriety" is a better descriptor -- always trumps truth (or expertise): The tendency to see OA as synonymous with OA publishing is in the air. So, by the air-time criterion, instead of clearing the air, Wikipedia just compounds the error, by canonizing it.
Wikipedia could have disambiguated the various different senses of "Open Access" helpfully by using something like "Open Access (Research)" but -- against all attempts (including by myself) not to have the entry for "Open Access" re-named "Open Access (Publishing)" -- it has been so re-named for several years now. (The history of the "debate" is still in the entrails of Wikipedia, for the intrepid to read, but I'm afraid the error is now too entrenched by troll-power to correct. Like politicians, trolls tend to dig into their misjudgments and misdeeds, not dig out of them.)
Wikipedia itself (notably, hence notoriously) is in many ways the "alternative" to OA in (too) many people's minds. Wikipedia is not only anonymous and not peer-reviewed, it is (aside from some recent ambivalence on this score) "ideologically" opposed to peer review (adjudication by qualified experts). In contrast, OA's primary target content is peer-reviewed research papers. ("Peer Review" is another descriptor that has been excised from the Wikipedia definition of OA's target content, despite repeated corrections: The trolls will not abide anything like that!)
So there we are: OA's biggest canard and nemesis, being daily, cumulatively, canonized and amplified by Wikipedia, riding the recursive tide of its own notability and notoriety (as an infectious virus, cheerfully propagated by the denizens of Wikipedia).
I expect that this posting will elicit stout defenses by Wiki-Warriors, but be forewarned that this Forum is devoted to Open Access (Sic), and discussion on Wikipedia ideology rather than OA pragmatics will be foreclosed, as such digressions tend to drive off the mainstay of this Forum who have been faithfully following the evolution of OA since 1998...
Stevan Harnad