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gjm comments on Open Thread, December 2-8, 2013 - Less Wrong
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I would like some feedback on a change I am considering in my use of some phrases.
I propose that journal articles be called "privately circulated manuscripts" and that "published articles" should be reserved for ones that be downloaded from the internet without subscription. A more mild version would be to adopt the term "public article" and just stop using "published article."
I think that if you do this and few others do, the main result will be to confuse your readers or hearers -- and of those who are confused, when you've explained I fear that a good fraction of those who didn't already agree with you will pigeonhole you as a crank.
Which is a pity, because it would be good for far more published work to be universally accessible than presently is.
A possibly-better approach along similar lines would be to find some term that accurately but unflatteringly describes journals that are only accessible for pay (e.g., "restricted-access") and use that when describing things published on such terms. That way you aren't redefining anything, you aren't saying anything incorrect, you're just drawing attention to a real thing you find regrettable. You might or might not want a corresponding flattering term for the other side (e.g. "publicly accessible" or something). "There are three things worth reading on this topic. There's a book by Smith, a restricted-access journal article by Jones, and a publicly-accessible paper by Black."
You don't think "privately circulated manuscript" is 100% accurate?
I think it's pretty clear to say "a privately circulated article by Jones and a published paper by Black," at least as long as I provide links. The ambiguity I'm concerned about is where my comment is very short; the typical situation is providing the public version to someone who cited the private version.
"Privately circulated" implies something that's only available to a very small group and not widely available. This might be a fair characterization in the case of some very obscure journals, but we might reasonably expect that most of the universities in the world would have subscriptions to journals such as Nature. According to Wolfram Alpha, there are 160 million students in post-secondary education in the world, not including faculty or people at other places that might have an institutional subscription.
Even taking into account the fact that not all of "post-secondary education" includes universities but probably also includes more vocational institutions that likely don't subscribe to scientific journals, we can probably expect the amount of people who have access to reasonably non-niche journals to be in the millions. That doesn't really fit my understanding of "privately circulated".
No, I read "privately circulated" as distributed to a limited and mostly closed circle. If anyone with a few bucks can buy the paper, I wouldn't call it "privately circulated".
Exactly.
Would you consider Harry Potter not to have been published because it is not being given away for free? Why should "published articles" be defined differently from "published books"?
Everyone applies "published" differently to books and articles. In fact, most people use "published article" to mean "peer-reviewed article," but even ignoring that there are pretty big differences.
Why did you choose to make this comment here, rather than in response to my original comment?
Like what?
A word is just a label for an empirical cluster. It's misleading to talk about "accurate" as though there were a binary definition.
The "manuscript" part certainly isn't, since these things are generally typeset.
I choose libel.
as always a phrase being technically 100 percent correct has a lot less to do with whether it's understood as intended than you might think. a privately circulated manuscript implies the protocols of the elders of zion to me.
gjm chose the word "accurate."