[GOAL] Re: Definition of OA and its Priorities and Obstacles

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 9:09 PM, Hélène.Bosc <hbosc-tchersky at orange.fr>wrote:

> **
> Peter,
> you wrote : "I am less than happy with the term "libre" which does not
> correspond to usage elsewhere and is at best confusing"
>
> In French we say "Les absents ont toujours tort" (Absent people are always
> wrong) .
>

I am sorry that the discussion seems to have descended to personalities -
this seems to be somewhat common on this list. I will reply briefly and
hope to end there.

I am not an ignorant newcomer to OA. My first posting to this list was in
1998 http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0096.html

 It seems that in April 2008, you were not present in the OA
> movement (Suber's and Harnad's definition!!!)
>

I was not a regular contributor to this list but I was active in OA, for
example, invited to contribute to a special issue of Serials Review  in
2008 on Open Access
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009879130800004X
(and before I am criticized for not being Open, yes - I put it in the
Cambridge DSpace repository - I also put it on Nature Precedings).

 and specially in the American Scientist discussions when  "Libre and
> Gratigratis and libres" appeared. Please see :
>
> http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind08&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&O=D&F=l&P=37608
>

The mail you reference is NOT about  gratis and libre , it is about "weak
OA" and "strong OA". I followed that discussion very closely, mainly from
Peter Suber's blog. I did not comment on this mailing list. "weak" and
"strong" were discarded in favour of "gratis" and "libre". There is, as far
as I know, nor formal community page (as opposed to mail list discussion)
about gratis and libre other than
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-08.htm (Peter Suber
alone) from which I quote:

"I've decided to use the term "gratis OA" for the removal of price barriers
alone and "libre OA" for the removal of price and at least some permission
barriers.  The new terms allow us to speak unambiguously about these two
species of free online access."

The "I" here is Peter Suber. [BTW I should make it clear that I find PS's
writing very clear.]

My point is and was that the terms libre and gratis are proposed by 1-2
individuals. Nothing wrong with that but there is no formal community
endorsement or critique available in static form. And since definitions
seem to be highly volatile on this list and in OA generally that is a pity
IMO.



>  A research with Google Scholar  with "Open Access" gives the following
> results:
>
>  http://bit.ly/OAsuberGS *3240*
>  http://bit.ly/OAharnadGS *3740*
>  http://bit.ly/OAmurrayrustGS *716*
>
>
These are highly imprecise searches and are not really worth discussing.
Many of the MurrayRust references are not to me and many of mine are purely
scientific.  So take them out and reduce me to about 25 milliHarnads if you
think it's useful.

>
>
>


-- 
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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