[BOAI] Re: Meaning of Open Access

[Andras Holl]

Dear All,

The thing whether Open Access relates to an individual article
or a whole journal is not clear. Does libre OA mean that anyone
is free to redistribute the whole journal, or only one, a few article?
Text mining rights are meaningful only for the whole journal.
My opinion that they should be granted - the problem I have
is not with the rights. It is with the practice. The OA journal
I manage has every article available in several formats - LaTeX, PS. PDF, HTML -
some of these are generated on-the-fly, some static. Indiscriminate
harvesting is a prolem for me. What I would like to have is
some method, which is a mix of robots.txt and htaccess,
maybe with a touch of legal content about the scope of
possible use of harvested content.

So, in my opinion, the real worls situation is even more complex
than either gratis or libre. There are many flavors of OA, and
I do not think that sticking to the bOAI definition would do much good.

Andras Holl

On Wed, 9 May 2012 06:37:55 -0400, Stevan Harnad wrote
> ** Cross-Posted **
> 
> On 2012-05-09, at 4:12 AM, Jan Velterop wrote:
> I would favour doing away with both the terms 'libre OA' and 'gratis OA'.
> Open Access suffices. It's the 'open' that says it all. Especially if it is made
> clear that OA means BOAI-compliant OA in the context of scholarly
> research literature.
> 
> I don't doubt that Jan would like to do away with the terms libre and gratis OA. 
> He has been arguing all along that free online access is not open access,
> ever since 2003 on the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
> 
> http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#msg6478
> 
> This would mean that my "subversive proposal" of 1994 was not really a 
> proposal for open access  and that the existing open access mandates 
> and policies of funders and institutions worldwide are not really open access 
> mandates or policies.
> http://roarmap.eprints.org/
> 
> It is in large part for this reason that in 2008 Peter Suber and I proposed 
> the terms "gratis" and "libre" open access to ensure that the term
> "open access" retained its meaning, and to make explicit the two 
> distinct conditions involved: free online access (gratis OA) and
> certain re-use rights (libre OA):
> 
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/04/strong-and-weak-oa.html
> 
> For Peter Murray-Rust's crusade for journal article text-mining rights,
> apart from reiterating my full agreement that these are highly important
> and highly desirable and even urgent in certain fields, I would like
> to note that -- as PM-R has stated -- neither gratis OA nor libre OA
> is necessary for the kinds of text-mining rights he is seeking. They
> can be had via a special licensing agreement from the publisher.
> 
> There is no ambiguity there: The text-mining rights can be granted
> even if the articles themselves are not made openly accessible,
> free for all. 
> 
> And, as Richard Poynder has just pointed out, publishers are
> quite aware of (perhaps even relieved with) this option, with 
> Elsevier lately launching an experiment in it:
> 
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/2012-May/000433.html
> 
> This makes it clear that the text-mining rights PM-R seeks can be
> had without either sort of OA, gratis or libre...
> 
> Let us hope the quest for Open Access itself is not derailed in this
> direction.
> 
> Stevan Harnad

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Andras Holl / Holl Andras                e-mail: holl at konkoly.hu 
Konkoly Observatory / MTA CsFK CsI       Tel.: +36 1 3919368 Fax: +36 1 2754668 
IT manager / Szamitastechn. rendszervez. Mail: H1525 POBox 67, Budapest, Hungary 
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