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-a…
) 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%3…
).
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(a)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_….
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(a)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(a)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(a)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(a)dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
> On 10 September 2013 17:15, Stuart Lawson <stuart.a.lawson(a)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.
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
> andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
>
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