Paper "50 shades of open" mentioning OD

Fifty shades of open by Jeffrey Pomerantz and Robin Peek. First Monday, Volume 21, Number 5 - 2 May 2016 http://www.ojphi.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6360/5460 doi: Fifty shades of open | First Monday

(CC-BY-4.0)

Summary at Fifty shades of open - AcaWiki

Excerpts with OD mentions:

Other definitions of “openness” are agnostic as to the nature of the intellectual property in question. The Open Knowledge Foundation’s (OKF) Open Definition (n.d.a, version 1.0 published in 2007) articulates what openness means for data and content of all types. The Open Definition explicitly states that this meaning “matches that of ‘open’ with respect to software as in the Open Source Definition,” as well as the meaning of “‘free’ or ‘libre’ as in the Definition of Free Cultural Works.” The Definition of Free Cultural Works (Möller, 2015) itself is based on the Free Software Definition, an effort to define what “free content” means in the context of the Wikimedia project (version 1.0 published in 2008). The Definition of Free Cultural Works identifies four “essential freedoms” that must exist for users of cultural works, the same as those for users of free software: the freedom to use, to study, to redistribute copies of, and to make changes to the work. Both the OKF’s Open Definition and the Definition of Free Cultural Works are broader than either the Open Source or Free Software Definitions, however, in that they refer explicitly to patents, in addition to copyright.

Communities such as manufacturing design and hardware — in other words, those working with technological artifacts — developed Definitions based on the Open Source Definition. Communities working with more abstract resources developed Definitions based on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Definition. (Though to be fair, the OKF’s Open Definition is in turn based on the Open Source Definition.)

Really? There’s no citation. What “communities working with more abstract resources” could they mean?

In addition to the bile being vented in the blogosphere, many open communities have responded to openwashing with more rigorous definitions of what “open” means. The Open Source Initiative has developed the Open Standards Requirement for Software (Open Source Initiative, n.d.b), a set of criteria with which open standards must comply, so as not to discriminate against open source developers. PLOS (Public Library of Science) has developed the “HowOpenIsIt?” Open Access Spectrum, “to enable users to compare and contrast publications and policies” across a set of criteria (Public Library of Science, n.d.b). In 2014 the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) required all publishers of journals listed in the directory to reapply under a stricter set of criteria, in part to “weed out questionable journals” (Mitchell, 2015). Building on the DOAJ criteria, Graziotin, et al. (2014) have developed a “framework for systematically analyzing open access journals” to identify which of a set of core open access attributes a journal possesses. The Apereo Foundation, which has supported several open source and open education projects, has developed an Openness Index to “assess the openness of the organization/community that creates and manages” open artifacts (Masson and Udas, 2013). The Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Definition, discussed earlier, “makes precise the meaning of ‘open’ with respect to knowledge,” and has undergone several revisions to ensure this precision.

This paper reminds me of when I was complaining about renaming the Open Knowledge Definition to the Open Definition:

I have daydreamed about a meta open definition, which would try to capture the spirit of Open even when people try to apply the term to things that aren’t fixed (knowledge, software) but also processes and relations (organizations, society…). This is probably not the right venue or time, but it a do-ocracy to an extent if anyone wishes to try.

This paper doesn’t attempt to set out such a meta open definition, but might describe some of the features of such a latent definition.