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<p>Hi,</p>
<p>
<br />This is a delayed comment on a posting by Stevan Harnad, dated 18th december, 2011. I was glad to read that gratis OA is not second class OA after all.</p>
<p>
<br />Andras Holl</p>
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<br />
<b>
<br /></b>
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<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Is libre OA and CC appropriate
for
scientific
literature?</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The goal of this essay is not
to
question the usefulness of OA - OA is not only good for science and society,
but
necessary. I argue in favor of the gratis OA model, or a readjustment of
the
conditions of OA, for creating a copyright model more suitable for
scientific
articles than CC, and for the creation of a protocol which is capable
of
transmitting harvesting semantics, access and re-use rights in a
way
understandable of machine
agents.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Gratis vs. libre
OA</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I find libre OA unnecessary. While
OA
(gratis OA) is indispensable, I do not see real demand for libre OA. I
can
cook up cases when libre OA would be advantageous - and I can give a
few
examples when it proved to be harmful. But the main point is that libre OA
is
not necessary - while OA is.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Who has the rights to
reposit?</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">To achieve OA, the green road is
open
for everyone. While I do not see much reason to deposit
articles
appeared in OA journals to repositories, I do not object to that. Non-OA
articles
should be made OA with depositing them to repositories. But who can do
this?
Obviously those who have rights over the article. The author(s),
their
employers, and the organizations involved in funding the research. In my view,
no
other parties are entitled to re-distribute the article. In other words, the
whole
journal, or whole volumes would not be redistributable normally, but
each
article individually
would (by the parties listed above).</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Copyright
models</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">There are several copyright
formulas,
each designed for a certain kind of documents. GNU or BSD is for
software,
CC is for artwork. I do not think that these are appropriate
for
scientific journal articles. I can understand why is there a demand for re-using
software
code or executable programs, or a nice illustration. As a scientist,
I
think that "fair use" and OA conditions proposed
above (gratis OA,
no
redistribution for others than who could claim rights over the article) are
enough
for
science. Or maybe we should specify something better tailored
to
scientific journal
articles.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Article
components</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">While I do not see any demand for
whole
articles to be freely redistributable and reusable or remixable - only for getting them accessible freely, I do see much
demand
for
some building blocks of the same articles. There is much demand for
re-using
figures. Scientists often want to reproduce figures from published
articles,
unchanged or modified, plotting new measurements, removing questionable data
points.
There is also a great demand for re-using research data. One scientist might
want to
plot
the data from the literature together with his/her own, or there are compilation
databases
which collect data from the literature. The demand for mashups might not be
large as
yet,
but I think it will grow. In these cases redistribution and re-use rights are of
great
importance. Here I think CC by-nc could be used. Another redistributable
component -
something
even desirable to get redistributed - is the meta-data,
including
the
abstract.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Resources for communicating
the
semantics, hints for harvesters and machine-readable
rights</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">While it is necessary for scientists to get access promptly to an article they need - something what is provided by gratis OA, mass harvesting of journal content is not usually done manually. I can not imagine a situation where it would become suddenly important, from one moment to an other to mirror a whole journal. I feel that such situations could be handled without providing libre OA rights to everyone. On the other hand, some parts of the articles - the abstract, the figures, the data - should be made available with well defined conditions, in advance. But the demand for these article components might come not only for individual scientists reading the article, but by robotic agents.
<br /></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I feel that we would need a mechanism
-
maybe a modification or combination of existing ones - to enable crawlers,
harvesters to
fetch
what is the best for them and for the journal or repository, and to communicate
the rights
for
automatic creation of mashups. Existing technologies like OAI-ORE, robots.txt
and
.htaccess
already have much (or maybe all) what needed. I illustrate my idea with an
example. OAI-ORE
could
describe the semantic relationships between the files on the journal website
(OA
journal) or in the repository. This is an article and that is
the
first figure of it, and that is the first table. All items could
be
present in multiple formats: the same article could be available
in
HTML and PDF. While it is obvious that PDF is for printing, HTML
is
for on-line viewing, the additional information that the HTML
offers
enhanced features could be communicated
too. One might want to give the hint to
a
harvester or indexer - a machine - that for text indexing the recommended format
is the
LaTeX
source. This information might be present article-by-article, but
it
would be even better to inform the harvesters or indexers about
the
structure of the website: where to find material to index, and
which
file is equivalent text-wise to what, based on file-names
or
directories. The copyright information should be also
communicated
with the robots (with the human reader too, maybe by other
means).
The crawler should be able to understand that which information
could
be re-used in mashups, for
instance.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</p>
<font>Andras Holl
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<br />
Andras Holl / Holl Andras
e-mail: holl@konkoly.hu
<br />
Konkoly Observatory / MTA CsKI Tel.: +36 1
3919368 Fax: +36 1 2754668
<br />
IT manager / Szamitastechn. rendszervez. Mail: H1525 POBox 67, Budapest, Hungary
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