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
On 05/15/2010 06:22 AM, Klaus Graf wrote:
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, [...]
Thanks for sharing this, Klaus. It was interesting to read.
I certainly enjoyed the spirited prose, and as a fiend for good names, I expect that I'd fully agree with the diagnosis of the root problem that brought forth such a lovely rant.
But at the end, I still have a, "Yeah, so?" reaction. I feel like the essence of the complaint is that contrary to what the authors want, other people persist in acting as they see fit. I have some sympathy, as most people signally fail to do what I want, too. But I don't see any obvious solutions.
Heck, I'd love it if our articles were based on pure, uncut Objective Truth, with no need to futz around with reliable sources and NPOV. Everybody would. But that stuff's expensive, and the only way I know to get that is by paying a horde of academics to do their thing. And even with all of them beavering away, we only get a trickle of the stuff, not the torrent we need to fill an encyclopedia.
Of course, if somebody, those folks included, think they can build a better encyclopedia, I'd encourage them to try. And I don't mean that in a snotty way; it would be useful to Wikipedia to have some serious competition. Just this week at work I was reviewing a competitor's new product, and it was both scary and thrilling, prodding us toward better work. It would be great for Wikipedia, and especially great for humanity, if somebody were actually nipping at our heels.
William
On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 1:45 PM, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
Of course, if somebody, those folks included, think they can build a better encyclopedia, I'd encourage them to try. And I don't mean that in a snotty way; it would be useful to Wikipedia to have some serious competition. Just this week at work I was reviewing a competitor's new product, and it was both scary and thrilling, prodding us toward better work. It would be great for Wikipedia, and especially great for humanity, if somebody were actually nipping at our heels.
It is true that we don't have serious competition that is doing a better job in terms of attracting thousands of top-rate experts in all fields, who can fill a dozen articles in their field with brilliant sources in an afternoon.
But we do have serious competition, and it is scary and thrilling - it also happens to be published entirely in Chinese (hudong, baike). But even if you don't know how to read Chinese, you can see how they display portals and amin pages; images, cartoons, and timelines; how they reference and discuss topics. And you can sign up and see some of the social and community-building features they use to encourage participation. (I'd love to see a detailed summary and translation of their policy tree -- especially policies on notability, fads, and trending topics -- to illuminate the discussions about how well our policies are doing in the larger Wikipedias.)
Sam
Some background:
When I was a librarian open access was one of the principal things I worked on. Stevan has been for over 10 years an acknowledged leaders in this field, and his propaganda for open access has been a key factor for the considerable success it has had--by now all major US and UK granting agencies now require it or are about to do so. All of us who use academic material are very much indebted to him, for I do not think it would have happened to anywhere near this extent without him.
But Stevan is very much set on his own preferred way of doing this. His way is good, but he thinks that only his way is good--to the extent that he has often tried to argue against other ways, even they they differ only in detail, and most of his activism in the last few years has been against other open access advocates. (I am, as you gather, one of the people who thinks other ways are at least as good or possibly better, and I have had many public & private discussions about this with him over the years, not all of them friendly. ).
There are two basic methods:
One is known as "Gold" open access, publishing by open access publishers in journals that are free to the reader, the costs being paid through some form of direct or indirect subsidy from the author, his institution, his granting agency, or other financing arrangement. (Familar examples of this are PLOS or BMC).
The other is known as "Green" open access, publishing in journals in the conventional way, but also putting the articles, or at least unedited drafts of the manuscript ,into a repository. There are two types: using a centralized repository , either on a nationwide or subject-wide basis (the familiar examples of which are PubMed Central in biomedicine and arXiv in physics), or alternatively on an institution-wide basis (good examples are Harvard's DASH or Stevan's own repository at Southampton, ECS )
The only form Stevan supports is institutional repositories. (for reasons, I refer you to his many long postings on American Scientist Open Access Forum , which he moderates in accord with his own views.) He opposes the term open access publishing because it suggests "Gold" Open Access publishers.
When I joined WP three years ago, I found that Stevan was exercising OWNership over the WP article on open access, which almost totally focussed on institutional-based repositories and referenced a great number of his own writings. When I and other made changes, Stevan always reverted them.
Stevan attempted to get his form of the article fixed by personal intervention with an eminent open access supporter very close to his own views who was a member of the WMF Advisory Board, and I believe also with Jimbo. I am also a professional acquaintance of that supporter, an extraordinarily fair-minded person trusted by everyone dealing with the subject at all, and between us in personal discussion with Stevan we were able to convince Stevan to let community processes deal with the article.
As phoebe says, the current wording is reasonable.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On 05/15/2010 02:27 PM, Samuel Klein wrote:
But we do have serious competition, and it is scary and thrilling - it also happens to be published entirely in Chinese (hudong, baike). But even if you don't know how to read Chinese, you can see how they display portals and amin pages; images, cartoons, and timelines; how they reference and discuss topics. And you can sign up and see some of the social and community-building features they use to encourage participation. (I'd love to see a detailed summary and translation of their policy tree -- especially policies on notability, fads, and trending topics -- to illuminate the discussions about how well our policies are doing in the larger Wikipedias.)
That sounds like material for an awesome group blog, a sort of ongoing competitive analysis.
It wouldn't have to only be about Chinese on-line encyclopedias, either. Just because the paper encyclopedia has become a bit of a joke [1] doesn't mean we can't learn things from it. There are plenty of other great reference works both current and historical that would be fun to examine. And I'm sure we could gain a lot by stealing ideas from other community and collaborative project websites.
However much Hudong and Baike are serious competitors, they're also mainly invisible to Wikipedians who don't go looking for them. There's a big difference between knowing intellectually that you're in a race and looking behind you seeing somebody running hard and gaining ground. I'd love to find a way to make the competition more obvious.
William
[1] Quite literally. This week Jon Stewart flipped open a paper reference book to make a point. After a slight pause, he lifted the book and dropped it on his desk with an audible thud. He smiled and said, "It's like Wikipedia, in a book!" http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-may-11-2010/release-the-kagan (about 4:48 for the gag, although the book comes out about 3:45)
On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 6:22 AM, Klaus Graf klausgraf@googlemail.com wrote:
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).
I certainly have respect for Steven Harnad's work in this area. But I have also had the open access articles watchlisted for some years now, and they are one of those surprisingly controversial mini-areas in Wikipedia. Since it's also an area that isn't very well defined *in the field itself* (I say, as someone writing up some materials about open access for my library as we speak), I'm not surprised that [[user:harnad]] is frustrated.
It looks to me like a straightforward disambiguation on [[open access]], and the argument is over what to put in the parenthesis for the article about the type of open access that is associated with both research and publishing.
I am reminded (perhaps inexplicably) of RMS's discursions on the GNU/Linux articles last wikimania....
-- phoebe
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