3 Mar 2010

Peter Suber's open access word contest

Peter Suber, the guru of open access, has challenged readers of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter to come up with a new word.

English speakers need a verb that means "to provide OA to". It should be as succinct as "sell" for use in sentences such as, "We sell the print edition but ____ the digital edition."
Oh, the joys of verbing a noun. Here are my entries:
  • "Openpublished"; "to openpublish" (or "open-published", "to open-publish"). Apparently there is already a meaning of "open publishing", which is to make the process of publishing transparent (open peer review would be an aspect of this, as well as Indymedia and Wikinews), but I think the term is little used.
  • "Commoned"; "to common". Meaning "to place into the commons", as most OA publishing uses the Creative Commons licenses.
  • "Publicked"; "to publick". Meaning "to make public". It's an archaic word, used by Joyce in Finnegan's Wake, sometimes meaning "published", sometimes meaning "populated", and recently resurfacing to mean making a private message public.
  • "Freeshared"; "to freeshare" (echoing freeware and shareware). This term is already a synonym for freecycling, and for a defunct image upload site.
  • "Openshared"; "to openshare" (echoing open source and shareware). This term is already used for an icon that represents the open sharing of content - an icon that could be adopted by the open access movement.
  • "Copylefted"; "to copyleft". Using the existing term, which refers to Creative Commons and GNU GPL licenses among others.
  • Referring to libre and gratis: "Libred"; "to libre". "Gratised"; "to gratis".
Can you do better? Seize the glory by emailing Peter.

The Open Share icon is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License from http://www.openshareicons.com/.

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