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

Tue Jan 24 14:10:50 GMT 2017

Another critique that may be more relevant to this argument: I challenge PMR's contention that it is necessary to limit this kind of research to works that are licensed CC-BY. If you gather data from a great many different tables and analyze it, what you will be publishing is your own work.

This is no different from doing a great deal of reading and thinking and writing a new work that draws on this knowledge, with appropriate citations to the works that you have read.

Copyright is only invoked if you want to actually copy an original table for inclusion in a publication. If you are drawing on data from thousands of tables it is not clear how often this will happen. If what you want to copy is an insubstantial amount this would be covered under fair dealing. If the work is free-to-read, whether All Rights Reserved or under an open license, you can point readers to the original. At worst, this is a minor inconvenience.

If you prefer to limit your research to works that are CC-BY licensed, it is your right to make this choice. Many other researchers, myself included, work with a wide range of data and do not choose to limit what we gather to works that are licensed CC-BY. One example from my own research: if a publisher has a table listing APCs, I screen scrape the table, pop the data into a spreadsheet, and work with it. Even publishers that use CC-BY for articles usually have All Rights Reserved for pages that contain this type of information. If I limited myself to data sources that are CC-BY I could not do this kind of research.

best,

Heather Morrison

c 2017-01-24, at 4:17 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk<mailto:pm286 at cam.ac.uk>> wrote:

There are many activities where CC BY or a more liberal licence (CC 0) is the only way that modern science can be done.

Many knowledge-based projects in science , technology, medicine, use thousands of documents a day to extract and publish science. (We started one yesterday at https://github.com/ContentMine/cm-ucl/ to extract data from tables in PDF. This will aim to analyse 1000 papers per day - and that limit is set by the licences - if we were allowed we could index 10,000 papers/day in all disciplines.

To do reproducible science it is critical that the raw data (in this case scientific articles) are made publicly available so that others can reproduce the work. Any friction such as writing to the author, reading a non-standard licence, etc. makes the project impossible. We are often limited to using the Open subset (CC BY) in EuropePMC. We cannot afford to put a single CC NC, CC ND, "unlicensed freely available" manuscript in the repository in case we are sent a take-down notice. That would destroy the whole experiment.

These experiments are part of the science of the future. If we had been allowed to use them it is liklely that the Ebola outbreak in Liberia would have been predicted (The Liberian government's assessment, not mine). Whether it would have been prevented we don't know, but at least it would not have been impeded by copyright and paywalls.

Put simply. Unless the scientific material is CC BY or CC 0 we cannot use it for knowledge-driven STM. I have estimated that the opportunity cost of this can run into billions of dollars.

Repositories do not work for science. They are fragmented, non-interoperable and covered with prohibitions on automatic re-use. I have not met scientists who are systematically using institutional repositories of data mining.

It seems that the desire of arts, humanities are in direct conflict with the needs of STM. I note that there are few scientists posting on this list. Maybe this division should be recognised and the STM community should continue with its own policies og CC BY and the rest use whatever commonality they can achieve.

There are no simple solutions where the law is concerned. Only CC BY gives certainty. CC NC and CC ND may be valuable for A+H but they are very difficult to operate in any area of endeavour.

I was told 12 years ago on this list that I should be patient and the Green program would deliver universal access and then I could start mining the literature. I have been patient but it hasn't happened. I am told that OpenAIRE still doesn't expose full-text.  We should recognize it and look for alternative solutions.

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 7:55 PM, Heather Morrison <Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca<mailto:Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca>> wrote:
With all due respect to the people who created and shared the "how open is it" spectrum tool, I find some of the underlying assumptions to be problematic.

For example the extreme of closed access assumes that having to pay subscriptions, membership, pay per view etc. is the far end of closed. My perspective is that the opposite of open is closure of knowledge. Climate change denied, climate scientists muzzled, fired or harassed, climate change science defunded, climate data taken down and destroyed, deliberate spread of misinformation.

This is not a moot point. This end of the spectrum is a reality today, one that is far more concerning for many researchers than pay walls (not that I support paywalls).

Fair use in listed in a row named closed access. I argue that fair use / fair dealing is essential to academic work and journalism, and must apply to all works, not just those that can be subject to academic OA policy.

There is an underlying assumption about the importance and value of re-use / remix that omits any discussion of the pros, cons, or desirability of re-use / remix that I argue we should be having. Earlier today I mentioned some of the potential pitfalls. Now I would like to two potential pitfalls: mistranslation and errors in instructions for dangerous procedures.

There are dangers of poor published translations to knowledge per se (ie introduce errors) and to the author's reputation, ie an author could easily be indirectly misquoted due to a poor translation. There are good reasons why some authors and journals hesitate to grant  downstream translations permissions.  Reader side translations (eg automated translation tools) are not the same as downstream published translations, although readers should be made aware of the current limitations of automated translation.

If people are copying instructions for potentially dangerous procedures  (surgery, chemicals, engineering techniques), and they are not at least as expert as the original author, it might be in everyone's best interests if downstream readers are not invited and encouraged to manipulate the text, images, etc.

In creative works, eg to prepare a horror flick, by all means take this and that, mix it together and create something new and intriguing. I am not convinced that the same arguments ought to apply to works that might guide procedures in a real hospital operating room.

I suggest the "how open is it" spectrum is a useful exercise that has served a purpose for some but not a canon for all to adhere to.

best,

Heather Morrison

-------- Original message --------
From: David Prosser <david.prosser at rluk.ac.uk<mailto:david.prosser at rluk.ac.uk>>
Date: 2017-01-23 2:16 PM (GMT-05:00)
To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal at eprints.org<mailto:goal at eprints.org>>
Subject: Re: [GOAL] How much of the content in open repositories is able to meet the definition of open access?

I rather like the ‘How open is it?’ tool that approaches this as a spectrum:

http://sparcopen.org/our-work/howopenisit/

I may be quite ‘hard line’, but I acknowledge that by moving along the spectrum a paper, monograph, piece of data (or whatever) becomes more open - and more open is better than less open.

If the funders have gone to the far end of the spectrum it is perhaps because they feel that the greatest benefits are there, not because they have been convinced that they have to follow the strict, ‘hard line’ definition of open access.

David

On 23 Jan 2017, at 18:30, Richard Poynder <richard.poynder at gmail.com<mailto:richard.poynder at gmail.com>> wrote:

Hi Marc,

You say:

"I certainly qualify as an OA advocate, and as such:

I don’t equate OA with CC BY (or any CC license); in fact, I’m a little bit tired of discussions about what 'being OA' means."

I hear you, but I think the key point here is that OA advocates (perhaps not you, but OA advocates) are successfully convincing a growing number of research funders (e.g. Wellcome Trust, RCUK, Ford Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Gates Foundation etc.) that CC BY is the only acceptable form of open access.

So however tired you and Stevan might be of discussing it, I believe there are important implications and consequences flowing from that.

Richard Poynder

On 23 January 2017 at 16:31, Couture Marc <marc.couture at teluq.ca<mailto:marc.couture at teluq.ca>> wrote:
Hi all,

Just to be clear, my position on the basic issue here.

I certainly qualify as an OA advocate, and as such :

- I don’t equate OA with CC BY (or any CC license); in fact, I’m a little bit tired of discussions about what “being OA” means.

- I work to help increase the proportion of gratis OA, still much too low.

- I try to convince my colleagues that CC BY is the best way to disseminate scientific/scholarly works and make them useful.

I favour CC BY over the restricted versions (mainly -NC) because I find the arguments about potentially unwanted or devious uses far less compelling than those about the advantages of unrestricted uses and the drawbacks of restrictions that can be much more stringent than they seem at first glance.

Like Stevan said, OA advocates are indeed a plurality. The opposite would bother me.

Marc Couture

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