[GOAL] Re: [BOAI] Meaning of Open Access

[Peter Murray-Rust]

Andras,
Thanks very much - this is a very useful statement to comment on.


On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 12:34 PM, Andras Holl <holl at konkoly.hu> wrote:

>  Dear All,*
>
> *The thing whether Open Access relates to an individual article
> or a whole journal is not clear.
>

Agreed - The normal practice is that a journal publisher will state the
rights for the whole article. the problem arises where authors create
different rights for a single article, normally by "hybrid Gold OA". The
rights here are usually not clearly spelled out on the article. It is
usually not even clear this is a hybrid article, or when this is made clear
(with, say a star "Free Content" or some such phrase - it varies by
publisher) what the rights are. The phrase "Free content", "Author Choice"
is publisher-specific and very hard to interpret, even by human.


> Does libre OA mean that anyone
> is free to redistribute the whole journal, or only one, a few article?
>

libre OA means almost nothing.

BOAI means that anyone can re-use the content in whatever way they like.

Text mining rights are meaningful only for the whole journal.
>

This is probably true in practice until there are machine-readable
licences.

My opinion that they should be granted
>

Thank you!


> - the problem I have
> is not with the rights. It is with the practice. The OA journal
> I manage has every article available in several formats - LaTeX, PS. PDF,
> HTML -
> some of these are generated on-the-fly, some static. Indiscriminate
> harvesting is a prolem for me. What I would like to have is
> some method, which is a mix of robots.txt and htaccess,
> maybe with a touch of legal content about the scope of
> possible use of harvested content.
>

That is exactly what we are doing in our Manifesto on Open Content Mining.
Trying to make everything clear


>
> So, in my opinion, the real worls situation is even more complex
> than either gratis or libre. There are many flavors of OA, and
> I do not think that sticking to the bOAI definition would do much good.
>
> BOAI is the only current specification that allows textmining but I agree,
it would be better to have other documents. I believe that it is meaningful
to mine toll-access documents and we need clear licences for this.

P.



-- 
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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