May I propose a new Unicode symbol to denote true open access, for instance applied to scholarly literature, in a similar way that © and ® denote copyright and registered trademarks respectively? The proposed symbol is an encircled lower case letter a, in particular in a font where the a has a 'tail', as in a font like Arial, for instance, and not as in a font like Century Gothic.
A sketch of what I have in mind is here:
http://theparachute.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/proposed-open-access-symbol.html
The intended use would be for documents and images that have been published with so-called BOAI-compliant open access (
http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read), meaning that all reuse is permitted, with the only permissible condition that the author(s) should be acknowledged (CC_BY licence:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This condition would not be mandatory, and also public domain, CC-0 licences would be denoted by the proposed symbol (
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
I am seeking comments and support for this proposal.
Jan Velterop
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