The newest issue of First Monday includes an article by Jeffrey Pomerantz (EDUCAUSE) and Robin Peek (Simmons College) that attempts to disambiguate the various meanings of the word “open.”
The brief introduction is reproduced below.
Pomerantz, Jeffrey, and Robin Peek. “Fifty Shades of Open.” First Monday 21, no. 5 (2016). doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i5.6360
Open source. Open access. Open society. Open knowledge. Open government. Even open food. Until quite recently, the word “open” had a fairly constant meaning. The over-use of the word “open” has led to its meaning becoming increasingly ambiguous. This presents a critical problem for this important word, as ambiguity leads to misinterpretation.
“Open” has been applied to a wide variety of words to create new terms, some of which make sense, and some not so much. When we started writing this essay, we thought our working title was simply amusing. But the working title became the actual title, as we found that there are at least 50 different terms in which the word “open” is used, encompassing nearly as many different criteria for openness. In this essay we will attempt to make sense of this open season on the word “open.”
Roxanne Shirazi
Roxanne is the Dissertation Research Librarian at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
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