[GOAL] How much of the content in open repositories is able to meet the definition of open access?

[Stevan Harnad]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 4:41 AM, Richard Poynder <richard.poynder at cantab.net
> wrote:

> OA advocates maintain that the formative definition of open access agreed
> at the meeting that led to the Budapest Open Access Initiative means that
> only papers with a CC BY licence attached can be described as open access.
> And yet millions of papers in open repositories are not available with a CC
> BY licence.
>

OA advocates are a plurality, not a monolith.

No, OA advocates do not agree that only CC-BY = OA.

There are two "shades" of OA:

"Gratis OA" = free access
"Libre OA" = CC-BY

 Take, for instance, PubMed Central, which currently has 4.2 million
> documents deposited in it. A recent search shows that only 24% of the
> non-historical documents in PMC have a CC BY licence, and so 76% of the
> content cannot be described as open access.
>

The right measure of proportion OA for PMC (or any repository) is the
percent that is Gratis *or* Libre OA, not just the percent that is CC-BY.
(It also matter *when* it is deposited: immediately or a year or more after
publication.)


>  The good news is that the CC BY percentage in PMC is growing over time.
> Nevertheless, that it has still only reached 24% a decade after the NIH
> Public Access policy came into effect suggests that the OA movement still
> has a way to go if it is to live up to the BOAI definition.
>

The figures are insufficient. Percent OA in PMC does not even represent
percent OA in biomedicine, in the US or globally, let alone in all fields.
And PMC, as Richard notes, is largely publisher-deposited, which means it's
For-Fee Fool's Gold OA rather than author-deposited For-Free Green OA.

That the percentage OA is growing globally with time  is inevitable, as the
old researchers are retiring with time, and the young researchers have more
sense.

The goal, however, is OA, not "living up to the BOAI definition."

And the growth rate is still absurdly slow, compared to what it could and
ought to be (and have been).

S.H.

 More here: http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/the-nih-public-access-
> policy-triumph-of.html
>
>
>
> Richard Poynder
>
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