I’m constantly encountering confusion about whether something is in the public domain, or whether it’s open access. And it’s no wonder, because the terminology is inherently confusing.<\/p>\n
If someone’s heard that material in the public domain is free for the taking, why shouldn’t<\/em> they think that a blogpost or a tweeted photo \u2014 material on domains that are sometimes excruciatingly public \u2014 is included in that?<\/p>\n If publishers have heard about how great open access is, why shouldn’t<\/em> they think that making some content openly accessible on their site is worthy of press releases vaunting how awesome they are?<\/p>\n (That one was a trick question. Publishers shouldn’t think that because it’s their job<\/em> to be informed about this stuff. When I see a publisher talking about their “open access” site while their footer continues to be blazoned with “all rights reserved”, I don’t assume they just haven’t come across a proper definition before. I assume they’re wilfully taking advantage of the confusing terminology in order to intentionally deceive people while retaining plausible deniability, and they go on my list of Do Not Trust The Evil.)<\/p>\n The opposite of ‘public domain’ isn’t ‘private’; it’s ‘copyrighted’.<\/strong> This means:<\/p>\n The opposite of ‘open access’ isn’t ‘unaccessible’; it’s ‘all rights reserved’.<\/strong><\/p>\n Something that’s unaccessible can’t be open access; this is true. But being accessible isn’t sufficient. Access has to be guaranteed,<\/em> either by virtue of the material being in the public domain, or by means of the copyright-holder granting an appropriate license, aka permissions, to users of the material. This allows users to share\/take over responsibility for making the material accessible if the copyright-holder can no longer, or no longer wants to, do it themselves.<\/p>\n\n