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)

****