[GOAL] Re: The open access movement slips into closed mode

[Stevan Harnad]

*Berlin Stonewalling -- or Flip-Flop*

1. Richard Poynder's take on Berlin 12 is basically valid (even though
perhaps a touch too conspiratorially minded).

2. The much-too-long series of Berlin X meetings, huffing on year after
year, have long been much-ado-about-next-to-nothing.

3. The solemn "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the
Sciences and Humanities <http://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration>,"
with its unending list of signatories
<http://openaccess.mpg.de/319790/Signatories>, was never anything more than
a parroting of the 2003 "Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing[sic]
<http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm>," which was, in turn,
a verbose reiteration of half of the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative
<http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read> -- skewed to only BOAI-2
("gold" open access publishing), virtually ignoring BOAI-1 ("green" open
access self-archiving).

4. For what it's worth, I attended Berlin 1
<http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/berlin_symp.htm> in Berlin in
2003 (out of curiosity, and in the hope it would lead to something) and we
hosted Berlin 3 <http://openaccess.mpg.de/319838/Berlin_3> in Southampton
in 2005 (at which it was officially recommended to require BOAI-1, green OA
self-archiving, and to encourage BOAI-2, gold OA publishing.

5. After that the Berlin series went on and on (I never attended again),
but the progress on implementing the Southampton/Berlin-3 recommendations
was transpiring elsewhere (with the ROARMAP
<http://roarmap.eprints.org/> adopted
mandates in the UK, Australia, EU, and US, starting from 2003 to today).

6. As far as I can tell, the Berlin X series just continues fussing about
gold OA, and although I am less suspicious than Richard, I too suspect that
the "secrecy" was because the institutional reps attending Berlin 12 are
trying to forge a common front for working out a gold-OA "flip
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?serendipity%5Baction%5D=search&serendipity%5BsearchTerm%5D=flip&serendipity%5BsearchButton%5D=%3E>"
deal with publishers.

And my prediction, for reasons
<https://www.google.ca/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=ZW91VrDFAqeC8QenqKyICA&gws_rd=ssl#q=harnad+flip+%22open+access%22>
I've
repeated, unheeded, many, many times, is that any flip will be a flop.

On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 5:06 AM, Richard Poynder <richard.poynder at cantab.net
> wrote:

> The 12th Berlin Conference was held in Germany on December 8th and 9th.
> ​The focus of the conference was on “the transformation of subscription
> journals to Open Access, as outlined in a recent white paper by the Max
> Planck Digital Library”.
>
>
>
> In other words, the conference discussed ways of achieving a mass
> “flipping” of subscription-based journals to open access models.
>
>
>
> Strangely, Berlin 12 was "by invitation only". This seems odd because
> holding OA meetings behind closed doors might seem to go against the
> principles of openness and transparency that were outlined in the 2003
> Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and
> Humanities.
>
>
>
> Or is it wrong and/or naïve to think that open access implies openness and
> transparency in the decision making and processes involved in making open
> access a reality, as well as of research outputs?
>
>
>
> Either way, if the strategy of flipping journals becomes the primary means
> of achieving open access can we not expect to see non-transparent and
> secret processes become the norm, with the costs and details of the
> transition taking place outside the purview of the wider OA movement? If
> that is right, would it matter?
>
>
>
> Some thoughts here:
> http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/open-access-slips-into-closed-mode.html
>
>
>
> Richard Poynder
>
>
>
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>
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