[GOAL] Re: Fwd: I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!

[Peter Murray-Rust]

I do not intend to get drawn into a logic-chopping session. I think that SH
is probably the only person in the world who actually follows his logic all
the way through.  However if he wishes I will show that several of his
statements are equally flawed and badly constructed.

The serious danger is that others will pick part of his utterances and use
them to justify their conclusions. The most pressing is that the TA/STM
publishers are spending massive amounts of money and lobbying to discredit
content-mining (TDM). That is because they fear it (they shouldn't). A
typical utteraance is:

"there is no demand for content-mining"

This is untrue. There is demand despite the publishers putting every
conceivable obstacle in our way. But publishers can now say:

"Stevan Harnad says:

*re-use rights to only a fragment of the research in a field are
near-useless.."*It doesn't matter to their readers that this is taken out
of  the context of a convoluted and flawed argument. It is taken as a
statement of an authority and can be highly damaging.

Another typical SH soundbite is "Elsevier is on the side of the Angels".
This type of dramatic utterance is again highly dangerous. It actually
means something like "Elsevier allows Green OA under certain (Catch-22)
conditions". In a world where advocacy matters, it is important to provide
good clear advocacy.

Of the statements above over half of them rely on premises unique to SH and
I don't intend to discuss them further. However the following is utterly
unacceptable:

*SH But publishers allowing authors to provide free online access and
re-use rights can immediately be undercut by free-riding rival publishers;
publishers allowing authors to provide free online access alone cannot...*

I interpret this as meaning "*BOAI rights are actually dangerous because
they allow unscrupulous publishers to copy and reuse publications whereas
Green OA can be used to restrict re-use and is therefore a good thing*".


I am not anti-green (if it were actually done properly it could be useful,
unlike the fragmented and hidden repositories we now have). But I think
SH's crusade is now doing harm to the whole OA movement. It is not that it
does harm on this list, but that it confuses the wider public debate.


Readers are invited to draw their own conclusions

-- 
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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