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Wikipedia:WikiProject Open/Open access task force/Signalling OA-ness/Background

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This page provides background to the Open Access Signalling Project. It is outdated by now and just kept here for archival purposes.

Background information

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Definition of Open Access

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By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

"Open access" is a social movement outside of Wikipedia. The Open Access Movement suggests that science is improved when scientists have access to research publications. From a Wikipedia perspective, open access is interesting because any Wikipedian can read and reuse open access publications, which is not true of typical publications.

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  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Open This is a project showcasing the spectrum of open initiatives on Wikipedia, including open access, open educational resources, and open source software.
  • Commons:Commons:Open Access File of the Day This is a collection of open access non-text media, mostly images, archived to Wikimedia Commons and each used multiple times in other Wikimedia projects. Typically, these images illustrate Wikipedia articles.
  • en:Wikisource:Wikisource:WikiProject Open Access This project discusses the mirroring of open access publications on Wikisource, and what tools could be made to give Wikimedians elsewhere better access to these works.
    • en:Wikisource:Wikisource:WikiProject Open Access/Programmatic import from PubMed Central This is a demo collection of what this projects robots can do without human intervention. View any of these uploaded papers. The bot knew that the paper was open access, so it copied text from the paper to Wikisource, as well as automated the process of uploading non-text media used in the paper to Wikimedia Commons. There are mistakes in this process but it is a workable upload and most people would say it looked fine.

CC BY and CC0/ PD icons

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This wording is essentially identical to that of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), which was drafted a little later. For this reason, the fact that some materials are open access according to the definition above could in principle be signaled by some of the icons used for CC BY:

Of course, materials available under CC0 or in the Public Domain would also meet the BOAI definition. Some relevant icons are:

NISO Workgroup on Open Access Metadata and Indicators

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  • An initiative directed at standardizing the way licensing metadata is expressed is the NISO Workgroup on Open Access Metadata and Indicators (OAMI)
    • Draft recommendations of the Working Group have been released on January 6, 2014. They include
      • no definition of the term Open Access
      • a <free_to_read> tag intended to signal whether and when a publication is available publicly without a requirement for payment or registration
      • a <license_ref> tag intended to point to a URI containing the licensing terms
      • provisions for adding dates to both tags, so as to account for embargoes
      • no specification as to which licenses are allowed, or whether and how they should be version-controlled
      • no provision for icons that may be suitable for signaling the content of the proposed tags.
    • Comments are invited until February 4, and can be left here.

Jisc Workgroup on Vocabularies for Open Access

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  • An initiative directed at standardizing the way metadata related to Open Access (not limited to licensing information) is expressed is the Jisc Workgroup on Vocabularies for Open Access (V4OA)
    • Draft recommendations of the Working Group have been released on October 2, 2013. They include
      • no definition of the term Open Access
      • a <readable> tag intended to signal whether a publication is available publicly without a requirement for payment or registration; in contrast to NISO, they do not consider delayed access here, as they handle embargoes differently
      • a tag intended to point to a URI containing the licensing terms, similar to NISO's <license_ref> tag but available in two forms (<rights-xml> and <rights-human-readable>) to cater to machines and humans, respectively.
      • no specification as to which licenses are allowed, or whether and how they should be version-controlled (though version control for scholarly articles is addressed)
      • no provision for icons that may be suitable for signaling the content of the proposed tags.
      • recommendations for handling embargoes (which differ from the mechanisms proposed by the NISO Workgroup)
      • thoughts on whether and how it could be signaled whether Article Processing Charges have been paid for a given article
    • Comments have been invited until October 21, 2013. The feedback is currently (as of January 2014) being integrated into a revision of the draft.

Existing Open Access icons

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However, these CC BY symbols apply to any materials under that license, so some symbols have been put forward to signal open access more specifically. The one shown here in particular has found broad traction (for instance, it features in almost any materials related to Open Access Week), but amidst considerable confusion of terminology, it has increasingly been used in the sense of free to read (example) rather than the more comprehensive set of use and reuse rights laid out by BOAI and CC BY. Color variants exist (see below). A less popular icon with similar ambiguity is at de:Datei:Open access.svg. As an alternative, ⓐ has been proposed (a slightly more open variant of which is in use with that very meaning of BOAI compliance here). Another alternative could be a combination of a look icon with an icon depicting some document, as in this slide.

  • PubMed Central use icons to mark journals depositing some or all of their content in the Open Access subset, as explained here and here.

Colors

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The meaning of the colors can be confusing.

Much of the debates around open access are framed in terms of Green vs. Gold, which boils down to whether the paper is available from the publisher (Gold) or from another place (Green). In current practice, neither of the two guarantees CC BY. To make things worse, a number of resources use completely different color codes - for instance, most of what would be "Gold" in the sense from above is Green in the sense of SHERPA/RoMEO, which also has blue, white and yellow to signal the availability of pre-or postprints, irrespective of licensing.

Some libraries, on the other hand (Regensburg example; there are also Unicode characters 🚥 and 🚦), use green to indicate to a user of their online catalogs that they have full-text access to the journal, red that they do not have access to the journal, and yellow if full-text access is available for some issues of the journal.

There are color variants of the above-mentioned orange lock icon, e.g. a blue one (usage example), or purple. Inverted colors (e.g. as in this Twitter avatar) could also be an option.

Signalling individual rights differently

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In principle, each and every use and reuse right could be signaled independently by dedicated icons, e.g. the icon pictured here could stand for an item that is free to read. Then, there would be several essential icons that would be needed to signal BOAI compliance (i.e. CC BY) - at least one for reuse (but that might have to be split into the different kinds of reuse listed in the BOAI definition), and perhaps one specifically for reuse by machines (i.e. crawling, text mining). The more icons we use, the higher is the potential for confusion amongst readers.

  • Reading icon
    Reading icon

Existing initiatives around the CC BY literature

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Ways to signal OA-ness on Wikipedia

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English

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There are several ways in which OA-ness is currently being signaled on the English Wikipedia:

Dutch

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There are a number of articles on the Dutch Wikipedia that have statements like "Dit is een open access artikel, beschikbaar onder de licentie Creative Commons Naamsvermelding (CC-BY; versie 2.0)."

Practical issues

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  • Ideally, the icons would be clickable and lead to a page that explains their meaning. In normal Wikimedia practice, a click on an image leads to the description page of the image file (which contains metadata about the icon, including provenance and licensing) rather than to a page that explains the meaning of the icon in the context of the click. This latter kind of explanatory page can only be linked from the icon if it is in the public domain (as in or ), i.e. there is no requirement for attribution. This is not the case for the Creative Commons icons.
  • Bitmap graphics tend not to be rendered properly on mobile devices.
  • It is perhaps best to start deploying the system in a limited number of articles, such as those within the scope of a WikiProject (e.g. Medicine).
  • In the long run, the information underlying the OA-ness signalling would best be served via Wikidata, which would also make it available beyond the English Wikipedia.
  • A system aimed at signaling the non-OA-ness of articles is currently being developed - the OA button. How could the two be combined?
  • In the long run, it would be desirable to signal not just the OA-ness of the cited references, but also of the data and code associated with the references. As there is not much OA-ness to signal there yet, this may be left for later.

Blog posts

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an exploratory study of citations by DOI and DOI prefix (topmost of those that are cited using the {{Cite doi}} template)

Events

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Code

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A repository has been set up at https://github.com/wpoa/OA-signalling to host all software related to this project.

Participants

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The core team presenting the project at Wikimania2014

The following individuals and organizations are expected to be helpful to moving this project forward. They will be invited to consult and get involved in implementing a pilot program.

People
Organizations
  • OCLC
  • Right to Research Coalition
  • Open Knowledge Foundation
  • SPARC
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