Today we’ve got a real treat for you, a post written by Laura Ennis, Edinburgh Napier University’s Information Services Advisor for the School of Life, Sports and Social Science.\u00a0So sit back, grab a sandwich and a\u00a0beverage of your choice\u00a0and have a read at what Laura’s got to say about the terminology surrounding open access:<\/p>\n
It’s a problem analogous to the irritation surrounding the naming of different sizes of coffee cups at your local caffeine-dispensary. Or perhaps a bit like the\u00a0Big Train sketch where no one speaks English<\/a>. Danny Kingsley hinted at this during her talk at RLUK;<\/p>\n “If you’ve got particular language and jargon that\u2019s what defines your discipline. So if you\u2019re in a discipline that uses vernacular words like Scholarly Communication does, it\u2019s really difficult\u2026 Words are a problem in the area of Scholarly Communication.”<\/em><\/p>\n The value of embracing unknown unknowns<\/a>.<\/p>\n Open Access has suffered from a confusion of language for a long time now. Pre-print, post-print, what does it all mean, and according to whom? The\u00a0CASRAI Dictionary<\/a>\u00a0project is meant to overcome this, however you will only find entries for two items,\u00a0Preprint<\/em>, and Journal Article<\/em>. The latter being not especially helpful for our purposes. So to sate my curiosity more than anything, I took a closer look at the Open Access policies from different publishers, funders, and governing bodies and made note of the terms they were using. Of all the places I looked the report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings (Finch Report<\/em>) was the only document that clearly identified all the stages in the\u00a0publication process, and named them explicitly. For simplicities sake, the terms used in the\u00a0Finch Report<\/em>\u00a0are the terms I will use for the rest of this post.<\/p>\n