Friday, March 21, 2014

Proposed open access symbol

I have proposed a new Unicode symbol to denote true open access, for instance applied to scholarly literature, in a similar way in which © 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 and Times, for instance, (a), and not as in a font like Century Gothic (without the 'tail' as it were).

My proposal should be on the Unicode discussion list (http://www.unicode.org/consortium/distlist-unicode.html), and I am soliciting support, and input from technically-minded as well as legally-minded open access supporters.

This is the symbol I have in mind:















Jan Velterop