Describing Open

When we first assembled the group of colleagues who would eventually become the editors of the Open Knowledge section of Katina, we found ourselves discussing what we meant by the many words we use daily—open, science, knowledge, scholarship, research. Everyone wanted definitions of these terms to work from. After robust discussion of the possibilities, the editorial team looked to me, the resident linguist, to assist.

I want to let you in on a secret that students learn on the first day of my Introduction to Linguistics class, one that always resurfaces in conversation about “definitions” and “meanings.”

What is this not-so-secret secret? Language is arbitrary.

These three words embody a simple concept that is not so simple to grapple with in our day-to-day lives.

Words and all that is bound up with them—sound, meaning, spelling, pronunciation—are entirely the product of human construction. There is nothing about the English word cat that in any way relates to the (often-)furry creature that many of us know and love. Just look at the many ways to refer to the same creature in other languages—billi in Hindi, gato in Portuguese and Spanish—and you will see a tiny encapsulation of the arbitrariness of language.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that words, and the concepts they refer to, don’t hold great meaning and value. But the sounds and symbols that we use to refer to ideas and to communicate with other human beings about those ideas are completely arbitrary. Some words —like open—mean a lot to us. It’s part of human behavior patterns to ascribe a greater meaning or profundity to a word that carries with it our goals, aspirations, and ideals.

However, part of the arbitrariness of language is the inevitability of change. When a new concept or object emerges, humans find a way to refer to it. Sometimes words can evolve to refer to new things. What speaker of English in the 1700s would recognize a mouse as the attachment to our computers? The first computer mouse—a device with a long tail (cord)—might have invoked a sense of mouse (rodent), but modern wireless devices bear little resemblance to their creature namesake. Yet we still use the word.

When the term open access first started to gain traction, a core part of the discourse centered around making research free to read on the Internet. As we have come to understand more about our world and its developing technology, we have, of course, introduced more parameters. Thinking about the rise of terms like gold/green/bronze/diamond open access in recent years to refer to a set of parameters around publishing and article availability, we can see the evolution of words like gold and green in action. (Danny Kingsley explores this evolution here.) The moment you try to set down a definition of any of these terms as combinations of parameters, there is a new combination of parameters to consider.

Perhaps now you see why I pause at the idea of defining open. What I’d like to encourage us all to do instead is to describe open.

Here we can make use of the concepts of sense (core criteria) and reference (possible expressions of those criteria). We have a general sense of what a cat is, which might include descriptors like furry, mammal, two pointy ears, small enough to be picked up by a human, whiskers, tail, four legs with paws and claws. We also recognize that there are many variations in cats that all still can be referred to as cat. They can be hairless like Sphynx cats, they can be very large like lions, they can be three legged or one eared, they can be striped or solid or spotted or mottled. (They do all seem to like sitting in boxes.)

And so it is with open: I know that we all must have a sense of what open is, because so many of us are working toward it in our various ways. Organizations and advocates have created various spectra of openness that illustrate the sense and reference. These spectra are used as tools to describe characteristics that make something more or less open (see, e.g., SPARC’s “How Open Is It?” evaluator, the Directory of Open Access Journals’ inclusion criteria, Collister & Villarreal’s Spectrum of Open Methods), and these spectra can be used both to describe core qualities and to encourage improvement and advancement.

When I asked our editorial team to describe some of the core concepts of open, they came back with some similar ideas that have been expressed in the spectra mentioned above.

Readable without payment.

Reusable for any purpose.

Unbound by strict licensing terms and usage rights.

Portable to other contexts and formats.

Inclusive of authors without restrictions based on demographics or ability to pay.

Accessible—everyone can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact.

Discoverable.

This list can go on and on. We can all add our own descriptions to this list, and that is part of the joy and utility of the exercise. With this approach, we might ask the question: “When it comes to research and scholarship, what can open look like?”

In the coming months, we will approach that question in a series of articles called “Describing Open.” We are not interested in being the final arbiters of what is or isn’t open, but in understanding what is important about openness and what we can do to foster that outcome in the world. We invite you to think with us about how we can describe this word that is so crucial to all that we do.