While OA has more color, gem, and metal variants than the Pokémon series, I want even more names for OA types. (743 words / August 30, 2023)
Everyone instantly faints, dries up, and blows away when you talk about the Open Access “colour naming system” (as Wikipedia calls it). Rightfully so; OA has more color, gem, and metal variants than the Pokémon series. That said, it may sound odd that what I want is even more names for OA types. More precisely, I want the old names scrapped, and a new and more fully-developed taxonomy introduced. A system more along the lines of the Creative Commons licenses.
When we say a paper is open access, yes, I understand it can be accessed for free. But as institutions, funders, librarians, researchers and scholars, more information than that is necessary because the type of OA being referred to has implications for how money is spent, what processes are employed, and uses that are allowed.
There is disagreement over what some of these categories even mean (ex. does Gold OA mean the author pays or not?) because the names themselves are not really descriptive of what they refer to. And for present and future policy-making and discussion, they also aren’t granular enough, either.
Creative Commons licenses aim to be a standard language that provides consistent meaning between users. Admittedly, when people see a CC license for the first time (ex. CC BY-NC-SA 4.), it’s probably not immediately clear what the hell all that means. But once Googled, the definitions are basically clear, assuming a preexisting knowledge of copyright (and maybe this foreshadows the major problem with what I’m suggesting here).
Over the weekend, I sketched out a first approximation of what a standard taxonomy of OA types. I won’t “defend” this prototype since all I hope to accomplish is giving interested parties a sense of a starting point. Enough hemming & hawing, let’s dive in.
The basic components of a potential Open Access taxonomy would include a uniform structure made up of abbreviated terms. Like how each Creative Commons license begins with “CC”, each Open Access type would start with “OA” to simply denote freely available.
Example: OA ASP-LP (2023B)-CC BY
OA = Open Access
ASP = Author Side Payment
LP (2023 B) = The second (hence, “B”) List Price the publisher publicly advertised
CC BY = the Creative Commons license, whatever it may be, if there is one
If you saw “OA ASP-LP (2023B)” referring to a paper, this would tell you that the paper was made freely available by a payment that come from the author’s side (doesn’t matter if it was paid out of the author’s wallet, their grant, or institutional fund), and the price was what the second publicly advertised OA fee price listed during the year 2023.
A variant of this type might be OA ASP-IP (2023)-CC BY, where LP (2023B) is replaced with IP (2023). IP, in this case, stands for Institutional Price, which means that a payment from the author’s side was a special negotiated rate between the publisher and author institution (could be university/library, consortia, or funder bloc).
Now for two much different examples.
First example: OA Gratis-NonCC (2020-2022)
This type would refer to a paper without a Creative Commons license made freely available (likely by the publisher) during a limited period of time, in this example, between 2020 and 2022.
Second example: OA ASD-CC BY
This type would refer to a paper made freely available through an author-side deposit (ASD) into a repository (can either be deposited by the author or a third party with the author’s blessing), and given a CC BY license.
Then, a variant of this second example: OA AD-NonCC
This variant would be just like the original, only no CC license was applied.
The list of types would continue to encompass the full range of OA. Notably missing in my examples are instances where no payments are required from the author's side for papers made freely available with a CC license on the publisher's site.
As I mentioned earlier, this is not a final model to be defended. This is a first pass toward a solution to a problem I think many of you would agree exists. Even as I typed this out, I could see loopholes and small details that should change.
Anyway, I am eager to know if you think the basic premise has merit.
Cheers!
AJ
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This post appeared originally on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/do-open-access-types-need-standard-taxonomy-arthur-boston/
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