[GOAL] Re: Gratis vs. Libre OA

[Stevan Harnad]

Forwarding a BOAI posting (with which I would fully agree!). -- Stevan
Harnad


Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Andras Holl" <holl at konkoly.hu>
> Date: January 21, 2012 10:08:49 AM EST
> To: boai-forum at ecs.soton.ac.uk
>
> Hi,
>
> 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.
>
> Andras Holl
>
> Is libre OA and CC appropriate for scientific literature?
> 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.
>
> Gratis vs. libre OA
> 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.
>
> Who has the rights to reposit?
> 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).
>
> Copyright models
> 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.
>
> Article components
> 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.
>
> Resources for communicating the semantics, hints for harvesters and
machine-readable rights
> 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.
> 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.
>
> Andras Holl
>
>
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> Andras Holl / Holl Andras                 e-mail: holl at konkoly.hu
> Konkoly Observatory / MTA CsKI           Tel.: +36 1 3919368 Fax: +36 1
2754668
> IT manager / Szamitastechn. rendszervez. Mail: H1525 POBox 67, Budapest,
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