Thursday, May 08, 2008

Open Access logo - help


Trivial as this may seem, I'm trying to find out who designed this "Open Access" logo, and whether there are some original files for it. I've seen this logo (or variations on it) on the PLoS web site, the open access publisher Hindawi Publishing, and the Mac OS X program Papers uses it.

It's driving me nuts that I can't find the original. Other widely used logos typically have a site where a designer or organisation provides a bunch of versions in different formats, such as the Creative Commons symbols, the ubiquitous RSS feed icon, and other projects such as the Geotag icon. It's sometimes desirable to have different formats of an icon, and ideally have a vector-based version (e.g., in EPS or SVG) format that can be used to create images at different resolutions, and these projects provide these files.

Apart from the interesting fact that there doesn't seem to be a standard logo or symbol for Open Access, does anybody know where this logo came from?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've done the same search for similar reasons, and haven't found it myself... I'll keep watching here to see if anyone knows!

Anonymous said...

Here was a comment left on my blog by Liz Allen from PLoS:
I am happy to be able to tell you that it comes from PLoS originally
and we willingly share it with folks that comply with the core
principals of the OA movement. It’s gradually being used on more sites I’ve noticed where it’s becoming kind of like a Kite Mark. Folks can contact me (Liz: lallen@plos.org, PLoS Communications and Marketing) if they want to use it and as long as everything looks ship shape with their content access and copyright, I can get them the right format for their needs. Hopefully that’s case solved for you!

Roderic Page said...

Great, many thanks for the follow up! Makes blogging almost seem worthwhile ;-)