[GOAL] Re: The bibliometrics of OA

[Jan Velterop]

Peter,

I'm with you on this.

The best definition of OA is still the one formulated in the BOAI: 

By "open access" to [scholarly] literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

The term Open Access is not poorly defined; it is just very sloppily used. Or even wilfully misrepresented. There are even those who, while seeing themselves as OA advocates, characterise referring to the definition above in a derisory way as "BOAI-fetishism". Honestly!

The definition above was formulated in Budapest, more than 10 years ago, precisely because "free open access" was – rightly – considered too vague and ambiguous. I guess the ambiguity suits some peoples' purpose.

Jan Velterop


On 28 Aug 2012, at 10:26, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:

> 
> Warning: I shall get shouted down for this post.
> 
> On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 1:04 PM, Stevan Harnad <harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> OA means free online access. 
> 
> When and where and by whom was this decided? It is incompatible with the BBB definitions.
> 
> One of the problems of "Open Access" as a movement is that the terms used (in the period after BBB) are so poorly defined as to be essentially meaningless - Humpty-Dumpty ("  "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."). 
> 
> P.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Peter Murray-Rust
> Reader in Molecular Informatics
> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
> University of Cambridge
> CB2 1EW, UK
> +44-1223-763069
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