From: Philip Davis <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2012 17:27:10 -0500
"People who believe that OA has an unambiguous meaning are denying the
facts." --Joe Esposito
Joe is correct. Open access is a very old term with diverse meaning.
The Oxford English Dictionary dates the phrase back to 1602, which, at
the time, was used as a demeaning term for licentious women. Its use
in library science to refer to public access to the publications on a
library's shelves only begins to appear in 1894.
A few years ago, I did a study of how the phrase was used in newspaper
editorials and it was stunning how frequently it was used in such
disparate contexts. Below is a list of contexts that I discuss in a
paper entitled "How the Media Frames Open
Access"<http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0012.101>
Affirmative action
Commercial markets (purchasing alcohol over the Internet; right to
purchase a gun (U.S.); direct advertisement to children)
Donor records to public colleges and universities
Financial markets (investor access; public access to stock trading)
Financial records (assets of public figures)
Freedom of the press (journalism, freedom to read)
Healthcare (access to health care, medical records, abortions,
insurance, hospitals, cheaper drugs from Canada, alternative
therapies, condoms in prisons)
Higher education (rising tuition, affordable tuition; access to
community colleges, public colleges and universities; access to
scholarships)
Humanitarian relief (N. Korea; Darfur, Sudan)
International trade (free trade; access to foreign markets)
Legal records (court proceedings, criminal conviction records,
juvenile records, child-sex offenders, prosecutor records
National infrastructure (public utilities, roads, carpool lanes,
railways, airspace, electrical transmission lines, gas pipelines)
National security (against open government; access to inspect
weapons facilities in Iraq)
Public institutions (libraries, museums, prisons)
Public and natural resources (oil, gas and electrical markets,
fisheries and ocean resources, shore and seabed (Australia)
Public records (presidential and administrative records; access to
public meetings, homeowner association records, calendars of public
officials; government information on Iran; Nazi files; Freedom of
Information Act; crime statistics; teacher evaluations)
Privacy (residents, employer access to genetic records of employees;
private lives of public figures)
Property access rights (public spaces, national parks, hiking and
biking paths, public land (UK), crossing farm land (UK), mushroom
hunting (UK), Old City of Jerusalem, Burma, neighborhoods; access to
school playgrounds on weekends)
Religion (right to religious worship, rights of Muslim prisoners at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba)
Research (right to access scientific literature derived from public monies)
School choice (public, private and parochial)
Telecommunications (access to public radio airways, media choices,
cable, Internet access and bandwidth, physical telecom network, public
Wi-Fi, Net Neutrality, cell phone spectrum; censorship in China,
television viewing by children)
Voting (democratic voting, access to polls, shareholder voting rights)
Welfare system
Wikipedia (open authorship)
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