[GOAL] Re: libre vs open - general language issues

[Nicolas Pettiaux]

Dear

I appreciate these discussions and clarifications. For me, and for most 
people who are nex to the subjects and I meet, "Gold open access" and 
"green open access" are confusing terms, even though they have been used 
for a long time in official documents.

Green refers to nature and gold to expensive. What else for newcomers (= 
most people in fact) ?

And nature is not necessarily cheap, while gold is most of the time 
expensive.

What is "cheap open access" ? By cheap open access, I mean the full 
price of publishing a work (most of the time online only) in such a way 
that its overal price be as low as possible and ONLY reflect the actual 
costs ?

The best method I can think of is forget about ANY journals, and 
consider as "publication quality paper" a work that is published 
anywhere online, be it on an institutional (open) repository or any 
website. Stop counting papers but only refer to their quality as 
measured for example effective evaluation of a committee made of human 
beings and not anymore by any accounting technique. Yes, this would 
suppose that on a per document base, or per person base, a committee 
would have to do actual work. But this is done already for most grant 
attribution or tenure selection processes. Maybe not yet by the actual 
reading of the papers and comments about his own papers an authors would 
write.
Comments on a public website where the paper is published could also be 
taken into account in the evaluation.

Many people agree today to consider that the peer review system does not 
work anymore due to a too large number of submitted papers and a too 
large number of journals/reviews.

Is there any other solution than dumping the reviews, the journals, the 
papers as they are evaluated and listed today ? I am not the one 
proposing this . I have discussed the subject with Pierre-Louis Lions, a 
famous French mathematician, professor at the College de France and 
president of the board of the Ecole Normale supérieure who mentioned 
such a procedure he would appreciate and support.

Best regards,

Nicolas

-- 
Nicolas Pettiaux, phd  - nicolas at pettiaux.be
Open at work - Une Société libre utilise des outils libres