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

[Jan Velterop]

We're clearly talking cross-purposes here. There is nothing wrong with the mechanism to get to OA, but there is no need to weaken OA as defined in the BOAI to just 'gratis' OA, which implies that re-use is not allowed and enabled. If 'gratis' isn't a weakening of BOAI-compliant OA, why introduce the term? And now we're apparently having LBOA and HBOA as well! We need simplification of what OA is, not making it more complex. OA is Open Access as defined in the BOAI. Basta. If that cannot be achieved by mandates, weakening it to 'gratis OA', without re-use rights, won't help either.

Jan

On 8 May 2012, at 22:25, Stevan Harnad wrote:

> 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
> 
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