When Focusing on Terminology Becomes a Hurdle to Open Access Outreach

Everyone working in open access librarianship has probably encountered some version of this scenario: a community member will use the term “open source” interchangeably with “open access.” For example, you want to promote the institutional repository, but the researcher to whom you are speaking keeps saying they want to publish in an “open-source journal.”

There are any number of terms researchers, faculty, community members, and other users tend to substitute for “open access” to describe how they conceptualize the open landscape: “open source,” “free,” “public.” As practitioners, we might feel frustrated by their apparent disregard for proper terminology or get sidetracked by a need to explain or provide a correction.

But when we get stuck on the exact terminology, we do our patrons a disservice. If we want to improve our open access outreach, we first need to get past the distraction of terminology and listen to the concepts and values our patrons are communicating.

Where Does This Language Come From?

Everything from training to subject discipline to demographics can influence the language someone uses to get at “open access.” For example, researchers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, where the use of the term “open source” in computer science—to describe software with source code that anyone is free to modify—is more familiar, seem less likely to use it in place of open access. “Public” is a term most people would associate with collective ownership: we all share public sidewalks, public parks, and public resources. In the United States, possibly due to the 2022 Nelson memo, “public access” or “public scholarship” have become popular terms to describe any open access scholarship.

Some researchers conflate open access with article processing charges (APCs) and use the term “author-pays publishing” (Schroter & Tite, 2006). Others think of open access as “resources for teaching, as a publication channel, as a social justice movement, as open source, and as ‘free for me’” (Salaz et al., 2018). Researchers may consider anything available online—from digital collections to news sites to image repositories—to be open access.

Likewise, with many government and grant institutions around the world mandating open access to the fruits of their funding, “compliance language” (Cirasella, 2017)—that is, language that echoes that of funder requirements—has brought some open access terminology, like “embargo” and “open access fee,” top of mind for researchers.

Is This Language Important?

Do the actual words we use matter all that much once we determine the “common sense of the subject” (Otto, 2016)? As an instruction librarian, I used to begin every information literacy session by showing students a picture of a can of Coca-Cola and asking them “What do you call this?” Over the years, hundreds of students answered “soda,” “soda can,” “Coca Cola,” “beverage,” “pop,” and every iteration thereof. But some students described the picture in a different way: “brand name of a soda,” “advertising,” “aluminum can,” and “image of a coke can.” Others used terms such as “unhealthy,” “evil drink,” “diabetes,” and “death in a bottle.” I periodically added their terms to a word cloud to share in subsequent sessions.

The students in my classes did not agree on terminology, but they all seemed to know what we were talking about. In “Describing Open,” Lauren Collister (2024) talks about the concept of sense—the core criteria of an object—and lists core criteria, or concepts, she collected from the Katina editorial team to describe “open.” Like the responses to my Coca-Cola exercise, the list spawns a disparity of terms, each describing a different facet of meaning: “Readable without payment, reusable for any purpose, discoverable.” As Collister puts it, “This list can go on and on.”

But sometimes, rather than illuminating the common sense of the subject, language can distract us from it. One example is the fraught language around APCs. When members of our communities conflate open access with APCs—for example, by using the terms “author-pays publishing,” “predatory,” or “pay-to-play,”—it threatens to drag our collective focus away from what we value. As librarians we want to focus on the freely accessible facet of open access, not the specter of payment. One way to do this, as described by Collister and Cantrell (2021), is by avoiding using language that presupposes that “publishing in an OA journal is necessarily accompanied by a cost” (Collister & Cantrell, 2021).

But even when we are careful to use our preferred language, distractions abound. Several years ago, I helped an economics professor parse their book publishing contract, doing my due diligence by pointing out important clauses that would limit their rights to distribute or otherwise manage their copyright. I took the opportunity to mention another scenario: open access book publishing. When I began to name some OA book publishers, they interrupted, scoffing, “No thanks, I want to get paid!”

Clearly the gift economy that most academic researchers work in was not for them, and I dropped that line of discussion. But this professor is not alone in their negative response to the term “open access.” We see this same line of thinking in arguments from some sectors that, since open access costs nothing to read, OA resources must be somehow inferior or of low-quality. A librarian I spoke to recently said that a professor they work with quit using open educational resources because students were not doing the readings. The professor felt that because the students didn’t have to pay for the resources, they didn’t see the value in them. Paradoxically, many researchers also feel that an open access journal charging an APC must automatically be predatory, more like a vanity press than a scholarly endeavor.

In each of these cases, terminology distracts more than it contributes to a shared understanding, preempting a deeper—and more useful—conversation.

What Actually Matters

The terms used by researchers in place of “open access”—open source, public, free, author-pays publishing, etc.—have a core commonality in what they are not: closed. Something that is “open,” whether through a specific publishing model, movement, payment structure, etc., can be shared. But in each conversation, there’s more to understand. When we talk to researchers about open access, to what learning outcome do we aspire? How do we decipher the values behind their words? And how does the terminology we use help or hinder that outcome?

The next time you are confronted with a researcher interested in publishing “open source,” instead of getting stuck on the imprecision of their language, try asking a question, like “What are your priorities for publishing in this venue: a wider audience, the ability to distribute many copies to your students, or …?” Their answer will teach you something important, clarifying the conversation and improving your outreach.

My conversation with the professor who rejected open access because they just wanted to get paid was a missed opportunity to, as Jane Otto (2016) put it, “speak to the array of things valued by faculty (i.e. positive motivators) that coincide with the principles of universal open access to scholarship.” I could have asked that professor if they were interested in retroactive open access opportunities from their publisher once their royalties were expired. I could have inquired what they wanted in terms of dissemination, and then talked about how OA work can stimulate demand for print copies. If I had tried harder to first understand what that professor was expressing, I could have given myself an opportunity to communicate more clearly.

I’ve learned from this and other missed opportunities. As librarians, we can stand to brush up on an old standby: the reference interview. When an open access inquiry is a dialog between two subject matter experts, it is more likely to be successful.

Here are three ideas to try in your next conversation about open access:

1. Start by asking some version of, “What do you want to accomplish?” My favorite question to ask right before any sort of instruction is “What do you want to learn today?” You’ll be surprised at what people tell you!
2. A library-centric approach often alienates an academic audience, as does a reactive appeal rather than a proactive call-to-arms (Otto, 2016; Cirasella, 2017). For example, from hard experience, I and others working in scholarly communications have learned that the term “institutional repository” often elicits blank expressions from faculty. It is much more efficient to emphasize prestige, visibility, impact, legacy, flexibility—whatever resonates.
3. Learn to “read the room”: observe changes in body language and attentiveness. If you are speaking to a specific core concept of open, such as licensing terms, and people start looking at their phones, note that and pivot. There is no sunk-cost benefit in a conversation.

Beginning a conversation with—pun definitely intended—an open mind can help you discover what your community members value, enabling you to focus on what liberates open access, rather than what constrains it.

Please join me in a conversation by leaving a comment below. Here are some questions to get you started:

1. What are some of the ways your community members communicate the idea of open access? Do librarians have a different sense of the word than researchers? What about practitioners, or the public?
2. Do you see any differences in core concepts depending on geographical region? What about discipline?
3. What do the ways your community members communicate the idea of open access indicate about their values? Why are the terms they use important?
4. What does your community value about open access?
5. Do you have any interesting strategies for bridging communication gaps between librarians and their communities?

References

Cirasella, J. (2017). Open access outreach: SMASH vs. suasion. College & Research Libraries News, 78(6): 323–326. https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/16681/18149

Collister, L.B. (2024). Describing open. Katina. http://doi.org/10.1146/katina-112024-1

Collister, L.B., & Cantrell, M.H. (2021). From “patchy endorsements” to intentional advocacy: Deconstructing bias in the language of open access. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2395

Otto, J.J. (2016). A resonant message: Aligning scholar values and open access objectives in OA policy outreach to faculty and graduate students. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 4. https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2152

Salaz, A. M., Johnston, N., & Pickles, C. (2018). Faculty members who teach online: A phenomenographic typology of open access experiences. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 44(1):125–132. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2017.09.006

Schroter, S., & Tite, L. (2006). Open access publishing and author-pays business models: A survey of authors' knowledge and perceptions. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 99(3):141–148. https://doi.org/10.1177/0141076806099003