[GOAL] Re: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster, Coordinator of Scholarly Communications, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Wed Sep 3 18:10:15 BST 2014

Jean-Claude,

What you say (beautifully), I almost completely agree with. However, I would like to point out that the original BOAI begins with a vision, and that the vision is different from the definition.

Here is what the BOAI vision:

"An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge".
from: http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read

>From my perspective it is unfortunate that we keep repeating the technical definition of BOAI and rarely go back to this vision. It is this vision that has inspired me (and perhaps others). It is a mistake to think that the definition crafted at that meeting is necessarily the best way to achieve the vision, or that the CC-BY license is equivalent to the definitional statement. If anyone is interested, my critique of Creative Commons and open access series can be found here: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2012/10/critique-of-cc-by-series.html

As for me, I no longer refer to the BBB definition of open access, but rather prefer Suber's brief definition: Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
from: http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm

I invite everyone to join me in abandoning the narrow technical BBB definition of open access in favour of achieving the great vision of BOAI to make possible an unprecedented good.

best,

--
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
Desmarais 111-02
613-562-5800 ext. 7634
http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca<mailto:Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca>

On 2014-09-03, at 10:48 AM, Jean-Claude Guédon <jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca<mailto:jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca>>
 wrote:

It seems to me that, in definitional discussions, we should clearly distinguish between ultimate objectives and intermediate steps. The definitions crafted back in 2001-3 were certainly imperfect, if only because much had yet to be understood and discovered at that time. Yet, they did include essential items that we should not abandon. And shifting ground in mid-course does not appear altogether wise to me. Yet, they defined a clear objective, a vision, a dream perhaps. And, as such, they are just fine. But an objective, a vision, or a dream, is not a reality.

At the same time, I understand Stevan's points very well and, like him, get concerned when I see people all tangled up in definitions rather than pushing for open access, step by step.

As a result, I would suggest keeping the original definitions, but treat them as if they were somewhat analogous to the North that a compass points to: we want to move in some direction related to the North, but we know that the North given by the compass is not entirely accurate, and we know that it is an ultimate end point that cannot be reached without many detours, if only because we meet obstacles. In short, we need to have some general, fixed reference, and then we progress as best we can in the direction we want.

In short, we should treat the original definitions as a strategic vision, but not let the definitions block our tactical steps. From a strategic perspective, a tactical move will appear imperfect and incomplete. However, this is not a very useful way to judge the tactical step. Instead, the strategist should aim the following kind of judgement: is a particular tactical step susceptible of impeding further steps in the (more or less) right direction? If it is, then, it is time to stop, reconsider, and modify. If not, let us accept it, even if it appears far from perfection.

And I would push the argument just a little further by reminding Stevan (and perhaps some others) that the idea of a perfect tactical schedule is as elusive as the perfect objective. Having the vision for perfect tactics may usefully inform decision-making in concrete situations, but it should not be mistaken for absolute necessity and it cannot justify rigid recommendations. The "terrain" offered by various disciplines, countries and institutions is much too varied to permit a single approach to every situation.

In short, confusing strategic visions with tactical steps is a complicated way of saying that perfection can be the enemy of the good.
--

Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal

Le mardi 02 septembre 2014 à 11:07 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit :
For the record: I renounce (and have long renounced) the original BOAI (and BBB) definition of Open Access (OA) (even though I was one of the original co-drafters and co-signers of BOAI<http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read>) in favour of the revision as Gratis OA  (free online access) and Libre OA <http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/442-guid.html> (free online access plus certain re-use rights, e.g., CC-BY).

The original BOAI definition was improvised. Over a decade of further evidence, experience and reflection have now made it clear that the first approximation was needlessly over-reaching and (insofar as Green OA self-archiving was concerned) incoherent (except if we were prepared to declare almost all Green OA — which was and still is by far the largest body of OA — as not being OA!). The original BOAI/BBB definition has since also become an obstacle to the growth of (Green, Gratis) OA as well as a point of schism and formalism in the OA movement that have not been to the benefit of OA (but of benefit to the opponents of OA, or the publishers that want to ensure that the only path to OA was one that preserved their current revenue streams).

I would like to agree with Ruchard Poynder that OA needs some sort of "authoritative" organization, but of whom would that organization consist? My inclination is that it should be the providers of the OA research itself, namely peer-reviewed journal article authors, their institutions and their funders. Their “definition” of OA would certainly be authoritative.

Let me close by emphasizing that I too see Libre OA as desirable and inevitable. But my belief (and it has plenty of supporting evidence) is that the only way to get to Libre OA is first for all institutions and funders to mandate Gratis Green OA — not to quibble or squabble about the BOAI/BBB “definition” of OA.

My only difference with Paul Royster is that the primary target for OA is peer-reviewed journal articles, and for that it is not just repositories that are needed, but Green OA mandates from authors’ institutions and funders.

Stevan Harnad

On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 12:52 PM, Stevan Harnad <harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk<mailto:harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk>> wrote:
On Sep 1, 2014, at 11:19 AM, Stephen Downes <stephen at DOWNES.CA<mailto:stephen at DOWNES.CA>> wrote:

Some really important discussion here. In particular, I would argue (with this article) that  the insistence on CC-by (which allows commercial reuse) comes not from actual proponents of open access, but by commercial publishers promoting their own interests. http://www.downes.ca/post/62708

Actually, it’s much more complicated than that. Journal publishers (both commercial and learned-society) have conflicts of interest with Green OA -- both Gratis (free for all online) and Libre (free for all online plus re-use rights, especially commercial re-use rights).

And, on top of that, there are impatient researchers militating uncompromisingly for Libre OA in certain fields that would especially benefit from Libre OA re-use rights.

And there are the Gold OA publishers that want to promote their product by lionizing the benefits of Libre OA and deprecating Gratis OA, whether from author self-archiving (Gratis Green) or rival Gold OA  and hybrid publishers (Gratis Gold).

And often, alas, the library community, including SPARC, does not understand either, and needlessly complicates things wtill further.

Let me simplify: Libre OA (free for all online plus re-use rights) is Gratis OA (free for all online) PLUS re-use rights. Libre OA asks for MORE than Gratis OA. Hence Libre OA faces far more obstacles than Gratis OA.

Yet we are nowhere near having even Gratis OA yet: Around 30% in most fields, especially during the first 12 months of publication (mainly because of publisher embargoes — on Gratis OA — but also because of (groundless) author fears).

That’s why Gratis Green OA mandates are urgently needed from institutions and funders, worldwide.

Once we have 100% Gratis Green OA globally, all the rest will come: Fair-Gold OA and all the re-use rights researchers want and need.

But as long as we keep fussing and focussing pre-emptively and compulsively on Libre OA re-use rights (and Fool’s Gold OA) instead of mandating Gratis Green, we will keep getting next to no OA at all, of either kind, as now.

And all it requires is a tiny bit of thought to see why this is so. (But for some reason, many people prefer to fulminate instead, about the relative virtues of Gratis vs Libre, Green vs Gold, and CC-BY vs non-commercial CC-BY.)

Let’s hope that the institutions and funding agencies will get their acts together soon. At least 20 years of OA have already been needlessly lost…

Dixit,

Stevan Harnad
Exceedingly Weary Archivangelist

From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:JISC-REPOSITORIES at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Richard Poynder
Sent: September-01-14 8:20 AM
To: JISC-REPOSITORIES at JISCMAIL.AC.UK<mailto:JISC-REPOSITORIES at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
Subject: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster, Coordinator of Scholarly Communications, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Paul Royster is proud of what he has achieved with his institutional repository. Currently, it contains 73,000 full-text items, of which more than 60,000 are freely accessible to the world. This, says Royster, makes it the second largest institutional repository in the US, and it receives around
500,000 downloads per month, with around 30% of those going to international users.

Unsurprisingly, Royster always assumed that he was in the vanguard of the OA movement, and that fellow OA advocates attached considerable value to the work he was doing.

All this changed in 2012, when he attended an open access meeting organised by SPARC in Kansas City. At that meeting, he says, he was startled to hear SPARC announce to delegates that henceforth the sine qua non of open access is that a work has to be made available with a CC BY licence or equivalent attached.

After the meeting Royster sought to clarify the situation with SPARC, explaining the problems that its insistence on CC BY presented for repository managers like him, since it is generally not possible to make self-archived works available on a CC BY basis (not least because the copyright will invariably have been assigned to a publisher). Unfortunately, he says, his concerns fell on deaf ears.

The only conclusion Royster could reach is that the OA movement no longer views what he is doing as open access. As he puts it, “[O]ur work in promulgating Green OA (which normally does not convey re-use rights) and our free-access publishing under non-exclusive permission-to-publish (i.e., non-CC) agreements was henceforth disqualified.”

If correct, what is striking here is the implication that institutional repositories can no longer claim to be providing open access.

In fact, if one refers to the most frequently cited definitions of open access one discovers that what SPARC told Royster would seem to be in order. Although it was written before the Creative Commons licences were released, for instance, the definition of open access authored by those who launched the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in 2001 clearly seems to describe the same terms as those expressed in the CC BY licence.

What this means, of course, is that green OA does not meet the requirements of the BOAI — even though BOAI cited green OA as one of its “complementary strategies” for achieving open access.

Since most of the OA movement’s claimed successes are green successes this is particularly ironic. But given this, is it not pure pedantry to worry about what appears to be a logical inconsistency at the heart of the OA movement? No, not in light of the growing insistence that only CC BY will do. If nothing else, it is alienating some of the movement’s best allies — people like Paul Royster for instance.

“I no longer call or think of myself as an advocate for ‘open access,’ since the specific definition of that term excludes most of what we do in our repository,” says Royster. “I used to think the term meant ‘free to access, download, and store without charge, registration, log-in, etc.,’ but I have been disabused of that notion.”

For that reason, he says, “My current attitude regarding OA is to step away and leave it alone; it does some good, despite what I see as its feet of clay. I am not ‘against’ it, but I don't feel inspired to promote a cause that makes the repositories second-class members.”

How could this strange state of affairs have arisen? And why has it only really become an issue now, over a decade after the BOAI definition was penned?

More here:
http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/the-open-access-interviews-paul-royster.html

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