Talk:Open access journal

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I am absolutely amazed (and shocked) at what has happened to the (formerly) Open Access page that was being carefully built up and updated by the leaders of the Open Access movement. And first, yes, the Open Access (OA) movement is a movement, and, yes, it does have proponents and opponents. But OA is also a concept, defined in 2001 by the Budapest Open Access Initiative. And it is also a real, concrete phenomenon, that has been growing rapidly and worldwide ever since 2001. By the same token Open Source and Creative Commons are movements, with one or more organisations associated with them.

Although I haven't the time or the energy to go through all the discussion that seems to have led up to what happened to the OA page, I infer that someone suggested it was a partisan page, and that there were opposing points of view too. That is fine; but the right way to handle that is to add sections that contain critiques, or even to create and link a page that is explicitly dedicated to critiques and opposition to OA.

But what has been done instead is the worst possible thing: OA has been deleted as an entry altogther, and replaced by a redirect to "Open Access Publishing," which contains new and mostly irrelevant material about publishing. The original OA content (I am not sure whether it is all of it, or some was modified or deleted) was instead renamed "Open Access Journal".

Without making this comment too much longer I will try to give an exact analogy with what doing this means, in an encyclopedia. But first, I have to define OA, because that is what this is about: OA is free online access to peer-reviewed journal articles. (There are wider targets for OA too, but so far, most of the focus is on the 2.5 million articles published annually in the world's 24,000 peer reviewed journals.)

So far it may sound as if it might not be such a bad idea to rename OA "OA Publishing" or "OA Journal." But there is a profound and fundamental reason why that would not only be incorrect but extremely misleading to anyone trying to understand OA and the historic processes afoot in the first decade of this millennium: For OA is merely the condition of free online access to journal articles. Publishing in an OA journal (OA publishing), however, is only one of the two ways for an article to achieve this condition (i.e, being OA, freely accessible online). The other way -- and it is by far the bigger and faster and surer way of achieving OA -- is for the author to " self-archive" the article (i.e., deposit it in an online repository that provides free access to it). This is called OA self-archiving, and it is definitely not a form of OA publishing; nor are the journals in which such self-archived articles are published OA journals: They are just ordinary journals.

Now the analogy: To subsume the definition and history of "OA" under the definition and history of "OA Publishing" or "OA Journals" is like subsuming the definition and history of "racing" under "swimming" (I deliberately choose the less widespread and typical aquatic form of racing to show what subsuming it under swimming would do to the other form of racing, namely, "running" -- and for the generic concept of "racing" itself.) A more dramatic example way to put it would be to define "international relations" under "warfare" (with "diplomacy" merely being a subentry for "warfare"; or defining "human origins" under "creation" (with "evolution" being just a subentry under "creation").

There is already an entry for "(OA) self archiving," and it is fine to have an entry for "OA publishing" and for "OA journal" too. But nothing could be worse, or more partisan, or more misleading, historically, factually and conceptually, than to list "OA" as a subentry or subset of "OA publishing" or "OA journals."

The current (new) "OA publishing" entry, by the way, is extremely partisan, vague, and uninformative, but I am sure the specialists in OA publishing will remedy that, once it is indeed the entry for OA publishing, and not for OA.

But the entry for OA must be restored, as the generic entry for OA, and not subsumed under either of the two ways of achieving OA.

I am not sure how to fix things again, so OA, OAP and OAJ are all separate entries rather than redirects to one another.

And once OA is OA again, and not OAJ, the very first paragraph needs to be changed, to restore it to the generic OA entry, and not OAJ.

Stevan Harnad Harnad 23:23, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Although I completely disagree with User:Harnad about the relative merits of open archiving and open access journals, I agree that the change of name is completely wrong, & I have objected several times both yesterday and today to the editor who did so. There are two routes to OA--that at least is something we all agree, and the main article on OA should treat both equally. We cannot expect it to decide the question, but it certainly cannot ignore it. And it should not prejudge it by using a over-specific name. I do not think the editor involved was intending to prejudge, just that he did not fully understand the vocabulary we use.

I believe one of the reasons motivating the change was the redirect problem from the Open Access page. OA has acquired a number of additional meanings, some somewhat related, some less so. (For example, it seems to be used for open access by patients to investigational drugs.)

The changes will bea little complicated, because I will have to restore text from previous versions, but i think I know how to make them, and I will do so tonight. I do ask that this not be complicated by others trying to make the same changes at the same time, and I've put a standard notice on the article page to say so. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by DGG (talk • contribs) 23:48, 7 January 2007 (UTC).

forgot to sign--sorry DGG 23:59, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] This page

This page is now the restored page for open access journals, before the recent renamings and changes. However, not all the many improvements made during the pasty few days have been incorporated. They will be. Some of the text in here duplicates the text in open access; this is temporary, and will also be corrected in the next few days. Please help by making any changes you think good, but please do not change the basic structure without consultation on this page. The entirely appropriate feelings expressed above indicate why such discussion is necessary. its been a long job, but undoubtedly this article page and related articles will be much improved by the end of it all. . DGG 07:37, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Recent changes

The rationale for moving material around was:

• The "open access" and "open access publishing" articles overlapped a great deal. I appreciate the differences between the "open access movement" and "open access publishing" in the sense of publishing on a non-pay-for-access model. However, it does not seem like a useful distinction to make to the point of needing two separate articles - the two articles would be largely redundant. I was thinking "open access publishing" was a good title because it disambiguates from "OpenAccess" and other things on Open access (disambiguation), but if you want to put it under "open access" instead, because this is the adjective phrase common to both the movement and the publishing model and other things, that would be great.
• There are forms of open access publishing that have nothing to do with academic journals; the "open access" page needs to cover these in addition to academic journals, which have gotten most of the attention. The recommended Wikipedia:Article size is no more than around 30K. Due to the volume of material, I simply moved almost everything having to do with academic journals into open access journal. Perhaps more needed to be left behind in the main article due to the prominence of this application.

Whether or not "self archiving" is a form of "open access" seems to be disputed, therefore Wikipedia should not take a position on it.

We should certainly not have articles titled both Open access (publishing) and open access publishing (which is currently the case) as this is too confusing.

Proponents of open access are certainly welcome to edit those articles, but should keep Wikipedia:Conflict of interest guidelines in mind, and should remember that because of the Wikipedia:Neutral Point of View, policy, Wikipedia articles cannot appear to be advocating on behalf of the open access movement. -- Beland 21:58, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

very true, nor can they appear to advocate any one segment of it. DGG 23:34, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Rename to Open Access Journals

The current name is not grammatically correct, which is rather annoying and unprofessional. OptimistBen 08:48, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

the descriptive name for such a publication is the singular, as in PLOS is a o.a. journal, not PLOS is an o.a. journals. Yes, it sounds awkward, but it conforms to the WP MOSDGG (talk) 04:31, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

No, it is not grammatically correct because in this case we are not referring to a singular journal, we are referring to the journals collectively. Sorry, you're wrong. And it is PLOS is "an o.a. journal", not PLOS is "a o.a. journal". See a and an. OptimistBen 20:10, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

yep, you're right about a and an. -- that's a matter of grammar. But the article on Scholary journals is Scholarly journal, not Scholarly journals and similarly throughout wikipedia, as a matter of consistent style. Logic and grammar have nothing much to do with it. Personally, I would have chosen it the other way around, but I wasn't here when the choice was made back in the beginning. Please check Wikipedia:Naming conventions, item 1.2. There are some exceptions, but this article is in any case not about the set of oajs, but about the concept and nature of an oaj. Its should match other articles in the general subject, and they all use the singular.Consider the overall set of articles on publications before wanting to change this one. DGG (talk) 01:09, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Huh, guess you're right! Still sounds awkward. Thanks. OptimistBen 18:34, 15 October 2007 (UTC)