<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div>I do not intend to get drawn into a logic-chopping session. I think that SH is probably the only person in the world who actually follows his logic all the way through. However if he wishes I will show that several of his statements are equally flawed and badly constructed.<br>
<br>The serious danger is that others will pick part of his utterances and use them to justify their conclusions. The most pressing is that the TA/STM publishers are spending massive amounts of money and lobbying to discredit content-mining (TDM). That is because they fear it (they shouldn't). A typical utteraance is:<br>
<br></div>"there is no demand for content-mining" <br><br></div>This is untrue. There is demand despite the publishers putting every conceivable obstacle in our way. But publishers can now say:<br><br></div>"Stevan Harnad says: <i>re-use rights to only a fragment of the research in a field are near-useless.."<br>
<br></i>It doesn't matter to their readers that this is taken out of the context of a convoluted and flawed argument. It is taken as a statement of an authority and can be highly damaging.<br><br></div><div>Another typical SH soundbite is "Elsevier is on the side of the Angels". This type of dramatic utterance is again highly dangerous. It actually means something like "Elsevier allows Green OA under certain (Catch-22) conditions". In a world where advocacy matters, it is important to provide good clear advocacy.<br>
<br></div><div>Of the statements above over half of them rely on premises unique to SH and I don't intend to discuss them further. However the following is utterly unacceptable:<br><br><i>SH But publishers allowing authors to provide free online access and
re-use rights can immediately be undercut by free-riding rival
publishers; publishers allowing authors to provide free online access
alone cannot...</i><br></div><div><i><i><br></i></i></div><i></i><div class="gmail_extra">I interpret this as meaning "<i>BOAI rights are actually dangerous because they allow unscrupulous publishers to copy and reuse publications whereas Green OA can be used to restrict re-use and is therefore a good thing</i>".<br>
<br><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">I am not anti-green (if it were actually done properly it could be useful, unlike the fragmented and hidden repositories we now have). But I think SH's crusade is now doing harm to the whole OA movement. It is not that it does harm on this list, but that it confuses the wider public debate.<br>
<br><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">Readers are invited to draw their own conclusions<br clear="all"></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br>-- <br>Peter Murray-Rust<br>Reader in Molecular Informatics<br>Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry<br>
University of Cambridge<br>CB2 1EW, UK<br>+44-1223-763069
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