[GOAL] Re: Open data and article text-mining rights

[Stevan Harnad]

On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 3:23 PM, Jan Velterop <velterop at gmail.com> wrote:

> 'Insist' here is shorthand for taking an approach similar to the one you are taking re 'green'.

My "insist" means mandate green gratis OA -- as over 200 institutions
and funders worldwide have already done -- with the prospect of
another very big one (FRPAA in the USA) becoming a distinct
possibility.

And Enabling Open Scholarship is dedicated to promoting OA mandates
and providing policy guidance to institutions.

What's the counterpart mechanism of "insistence" for what you are
advocating, Jan?

> 'We' is shorthand for those who care about achieving Open Access (true BOAI-compliant  OA) and wish to convince others to do the same.

What's the counterpart mechanism of "insistence" on providing true
BOAI-compliant  OA?

> Whatever 'practical strategy' is unlikely to succeed without a clear goal – which should be BOAI-compliant OA – and for a 'hearts and minds' matter like OA also not without an unambiguous ideological substrate. Practical strategies don't fire enough researchers up, evidently; ideology may.

I can't follow, Jan. Mandates generate green gratis OA, and advocacy
generates mandates.

What is the counterpart of this for libre OA?

> You are lowering the OA bar ("gratis is enough") hoping to get more mandates, an approach reasonable if you believe mandates or similar legal measures will solve the lack-of-OA problem.

They certainly solve the lack-of-gratis-OA problem. And we certainly
lack gratis OA.

What is the practical counterpart for libre OA?

> I am on the side of those who wish to change the 'cultural' behaviour of scientists with regard to sharing their research results, and on the side of those who wish to refrain from lowering the OA bar.

Lowering the bar for whom? Most authors are not providing the
lower-bar OA unless mandated. I presume you are not against mandating
lower-bar OA, or against complying with lower-bar OA. (Are you?)

So what does being against lowering the bar mean, practically
speaking? How to get authors -- who don't provide lower-bar OA unless
mandated -- to provide higher-bar OA? Try to mandate that? (But then
you're up against both authors and publishers.)

> So by all means, let legal measures play a role, but not at the expense of lowering the bar to 'gratis' OA. If one believes in mandates, then there is no reason why BOAI-compliant OA ('libre' in your lingo) should not be mandated.

So, after all, you *do* mean "no mandates at all unless they are for
higher-bar OA"?

How do you propose to persuade authors to do more (HBOA), when they
won't even do less (LBOA), unmandated? And how do you persuade funders
and institutions to mandate HBOA, against resistance from authors and
publishers, when funders and institutions are even ready to lower the
bar for LBOA even lower, to accommodate publisher embargoes (LLBOA?)?

> Unreasonable? Perhaps.
>
> George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

I had thought it was reasonable to expect researchers to provide LBOA
of their own accord, unmandated, out of self-ineterest. I learned that
that wasn't enough. So, with others, we adapted toward the mandatory
route.

What is your practical accommodation against the dictates of reason?

Stevan Harnad