When Focusing on Terminology Becomes a Hurdle to Open Access Outreach | Katina Magazine

"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."