[GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] Unanimity (Re: Monographs)

[Jan Velterop]

"Open Access is NOT a publishing model"

Exactly right. OA is a characteristic of an item of scholarly literature. Not even of a journal or publisher (though all items/articles they publish may of course be OA, in which case the terms 'OA journal' and 'OA publisher' are shorthand for that).

This is also why mandates should require open access, and not get into how that open access is obtained (via a 'gold' or 'green' – or any other – route), as the latter only serves to cloud the issue and causes unnecessary confusion and conflation with financial issues that may be legitimate in their own right, but are different from the open access issue.

Furthermore, 'libre open access' is a tautology. Open access *is* libre access (and in French often referred to as such). And 'gratis open access' implies too much. What is called 'gratis open access' is just 'gratis access'. At the first BOAI meeting, the term 'open access' was advisedly chosen to describe something more than just gratis access. The term 'free access' was rejected because of the ambiguity in the English language of the word 'free', since it could be read to mean just 'gratis'. The word 'open', since it implies 'free', but could be read to be more encompassing, was deemed to be more suitable as shorthand for scholarly literature's "free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself."

Jan Velterop
 
On 26 Nov 2013, at 06:50, Andrew A. Adams <aaa at MEIJI.AC.JP> wrote:

> Rick Anderson wrote:
>> Researchers tend to see OA models as presenting a mixed bag of upsides
>> and downsides (as any publishing model does).
> 
> Open Access is NOT a publishing model. It is a descriptive binary property of 
> an article: is it available electronically, without fee, from an easily 
> locatable source (gratis OA; and with a suitable license for libre OA)?
> 
> Green OA is not 8directly) about publishing models (though if we reach close 
> to 100% Green gratis OA there may be consequences for some business models of 
> publishing).
> 
> There are many routes to OA, some involving new publishing models, but OA is 
> a description not a model.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
> Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
> Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
> Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/
> 
> 
> 
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