[GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly CompromisesCredibilityofBeall's List

[Peter Murray-Rust]

The only values in OA that matter to me (and many others) are those in the
BOAI (and related BBB) declarations. These are declarations of human
rights. They fed off early declarations such as Richard Stallman's freedoms
in software and are mirrored in many other endeavours.These include  Free
and Open Source, Open Data (a term I resurrected in 2006), Open Government
Data, Open Bibliography, Open Citations, and many more (Dave Flanders has a
complete alphabet). The term "libre" is often used synonymously with
Free/Open.

Perhaps the greatest victory for Libre was the human genome - preserved for
all of us and not controlled by an uncontrollable company.

All of these conform to the Open Definition of the Open Knowledge
Foundation -

"free to use, re-use and redistribute"

simple, clear, useful and empowering. For us in OKF Open is not an end in
itself, but is to make knowledge USEFUL. For saving the planet; for
increasing human health, for making better decisions, for educating.

BOAI-Open ensures that. It's nothing to do with peer review. It's based on
justice for every citizen of the planet.

When the BOAI was launched I celebrated. It seemed a great step forward.
But over the years several of the signatories have backed away from the use
of BOAI as a vision of Open. Something can be "OA-libre" if we are allowed
"some" unspecified removal of barriers. This is not only a completely
useless definition but discredits OA in activities outside. It seems that
many of the signatories don't really care about the values of the BOAI.

For me Green Access is not libre. Green is a concession allowed on
arbitrary occasions by an occupying power - a toll-access publisher. It is
not negotiated, it is not a right. It does not lead to justice.

And it's costing hundreds of millions each year, if not more, in terms of
opportunity costs. The human genome (fully libre) has generated downstream
wealth of 140 dollars for every dollar invested. What has OA generated in
downstream wealth? Because of its fragmented nature it's unmeasurable. But
I have calculated that in chemistry alone BOAI-compliant publications
(which allows content-mining) would generate "low billions per year"
worldwide - this is the figure I transmitted to the UK government. That is
the opportunity cost of non-BOAI.

FWIW I am starting large scale content-mining of science this week. And I
shall publish the results under CC0 (OKD compliant). Anyone interested in
true Open-ness is welcome to help.


On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 5:20 PM, Graham Triggs <grahamtriggs at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 12 December 2013 15:14, Sally Morris <sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk>wrote:
>
>>  But I still feel that the BOAI definition may be an unnecessarily
>> tight/narrow definition of the end: optimal scholarly exchange, as you put
>> it (or unimpeded access to research articles for those who need to read
>> them, as I would perhaps more narrowly describe it)
>>
>
> Sorry Sally, but I really have to disagree. It is a definition for what a
> number of people considered to be important. Plus, it is consistent with
> the other existing definitions of "open ..." (such as open source).
>
> Clearly, other people may have a different opinion. Some may feel that
> everyone who needs access already has it (or they at least don't feel that
> people denied access are particularly relevant to them). Others may believe
> that only being able to read is important, and additional terms, whilst
> beneficial are not as necessary, and may be holding back delivering
> "access".
>
> That doesn't mean that the BOAI definition is too narrow. It means that
> people are campaigning for a different end. Which is fine. But as they are
> different ends (with some similarities), let's call them different things.
> We have "Open Access" - as defined by BOAI, and there is "public access",
> which provides the ability to read for free, but with none of the other
> freedoms.
>
> Let people choose which unambiguously defined term provides for optimal
> scholarly exchange, rather than redefining a 10 year-old term, changes to
> which nobody will ever be able to agree on.
>
> G
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL at eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>
>


-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20131212/1ffb9c76/attachment.html