[GOAL] Re: One way to expand the OA movement: be more inclusive

[David Prosser]

Ever since ‘Open Access’ was first defined there have been people who have wanted to redefine it.  Heather is the latest of these.  The trouble is, by broadening the definition of ‘Open Access’ it is in danger of becoming meaningless.

So, Heather wants to include journals who make their content freely available after one or two years.  I certainly agree that free access after two years is better than no free access after two years, but where do we draw the line - is a five year embargo ‘Open Access'? Ten? Fifty?  And Heather has warned us of the hypothetical dangers of CC-BY papers being re-enclosed, but wants us to consider entire archives where free access can be turned off at the flick of a switch at the whim of the publisher as being open access!

I’m all for celebrating free archives, and if somebody wants to compile a list then that would be great - but let’s not call it ‘Open Access’.  The trouble with all the attempts to redefine ‘Open Access’ is that nobody has come up with a definition that improves on that of the Budapest Open Access Initiative of 2002.

Heather’s final paragraph is frankly baffling.  I know of nobody who feels that 'the OA movement consists of the small group of people who have been to meetings in Budapest’.  What I do know is that many of those who attended the first meeting in 2002 where the definition of Open Access was thrashed out have spend a huge amount of their time over the past 13 years travelling the world promoting open access.  Often, especially in the early years, to audiences that were in single-figures and/or overtly hostile.  The fact that there is an OA movement today is, in great part, thanks to the inspiring efforts of those early pioneers (together with others).  They have advocated for repositories, for mandates, for open source software to allow cheaper journal publishing, for more liberal licensing, etc., etc.   Denigrating them by implication is quite ridiculous revisionism.  (And for full disclosure, I attended the 10th anniversary meeting in Budapest, where we were able to celebrate a vibrant, international OA movement.)

David



On 30 May 2015, at 20:03, Heather Morrison <Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca> wrote:

> What if, instead of condemning the many people who are doing their best to provide the most open access they feel they can, the OA movement were to be more inclusive? For example, DOAJ excludes journals that make their work freely available after one or two years' embargo. I realize and agree that we want immediate OA, but the vast majority of such journals are published by people who are completely in favour of open access but just haven't figured out how to make the economics work for them. 
> 
> The opposite of open access is closed access. The Big Chill report on the silencing of federal scientists in Canada is a good illustration. Excerpt: "the survey [of Canadian federal scientists] ...found that nearly one-quarter (24%) of respondents had been directly asked to exclude or alter information for non-scientific reasons and that over one-third (37%) had been prevented in the past five years from responding to questions from the public and media" from: http://www.pipsc.ca/portal/page/portal/website/issues/science/bigchill
> 
> I understand that the U.S. has had similar problems with political interference with science, e.g. states such as Florida having legislature forbidding reference to climate change (example here: http://fcir.org/2015/03/08/in-florida-officials-ban-term-climate-change/)
> 
> Even without any political interference, works under toll access can be locked down for the full term of copyright. In the U.S. that's life of the author plus 70 years. If a work is written 30 years before an author dies, that's a century. The great many works freely available within a year or a few of publication should be understood as a huge success, not a failure. 
> 
> If the OA movement consists of the small group of people who have been to meetings in Budapest [sometimes people on this list talk as if this were the case],  that's a small movement indeed and not likely to grow very much. On the other hand, if the OA movement is seen as the millions of authors who have provided free access to their own work (however they did this), the thousands of journals providing free access (whether we think they are perfect in this or not), the thousands of repositories - that's a huge global movement, one that we can build upon to continue and grow the momentum to date. 
> 
> best,
> 
> -- 
> Dr. Heather Morrison
> Assistant Professor
> École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
> University of Ottawa
> http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
> Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
> Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca
> 
> 
> 
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