[GOAL] Re: Meaning of Open Access

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 11:37 AM, Stevan Harnad <harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk>wrote:

> ** Cross-Posted **
>
>
> For Peter Murray-Rust's crusade for journal article text-mining rights,
> apart from reiterating my full agreement that these are highly important
> and highly desirable and even urgent in certain fields, I would like
> to note that -- as PM-R has stated -- neither gratis OA nor libre OA
> is necessary for the kinds of text-mining rights he is seeking. They
> can be had via a special licensing agreement from the publisher.
>
> There is no ambiguity there: The text-mining rights can be granted
> even if the articles themselves are not made openly accessible,
> free for all.
>
> Well of course they can. Nature will charge UCSC the special price of
85,000 USD for a single institution. I have no doubt that a somewhat larger
sum per institution could even buy the ACS's involvement.


> And, as Richard Poynder has just pointed out, publishers are
> quite aware of (perhaps even relieved with) this option, with
> Elsevier lately launching an experiment in it:
>

Well of course they are. If libraries and universities are happy to do
special one-to-one deals with publishers they are in command of a new
market. We handed them the copyright of our articles. We are in danger of
repeating this for content-mining

We sometimes forget that we created the content and that we have a very
deep set of rights in it. I believe absolute. Others believe that giving
away our material to publishers is an acceptable  the price for
impact-branded journals and peer-review.

The point of the discussion IMO is that we are (or should be) fighting for
our rights. Green OA gives us no rights other than to read. No re-use for
lecture notes, no re-use for anything in the electronic era.

And there is no guarantee that Green OA will not be taken away at some
stage. Where are the signed contracts constraining the publishers? There is
no negotiating body for the universities or authors. My simple
understanding is that Green OA (a concession from the publishers) is given
only as long as the repositories are negligibly populated and almost
impossible to use effectively. Suppose they got to 100% full - with a
proper search systems - and the publishers lost business. They'd find a way
to limit depositions - if one were necessary. HINARI switched off
Bangladesh when they thought it would impact their business - they can and
probably will do the same with Green.



-- 
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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