[Open-access] Unhelpful post from Heather Morrison

Tue Feb 14 09:38:39 UTC 2012

Heather Morrison writes the often fascinating blog The Imaginary
Journal of Poetic Economics
        http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/

But today's BOAI 10th Anniversary post is problematic:
        http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2012/02/way-of-saying-this-is-open-access.html

She quotes from BOAI, which is clearly (from her own quoting)
describing a regime compatible with CC-BY, but asserts that her own
CC-BY-NC-SA blog complies.  Despite this, from the BOAI: "By "open
access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the
public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy,
distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these
articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or
use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or
technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to
the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and
distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should
be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the
right to be properly acknowledged and cited."

I am not suggesting that we need to do anything in response to this --
because of Heather's odd choice not to allow comments on her blog it
rarely generates a lot of buzz -- but to illustrate the magnitude of
the difficulty we face when even so committed an OA advocate as her
can make such a mistake about licensing.

So I am more and more thinking that before we plough too much effort
into trying to get people to change their licensing terms, we have
some work to do just getting them to say what those terms are: see for
example this on Elsevier's "sponsored article" terms, which despite
having been brought to the attention of both Alice Wise and Tom Reller
has yet to receive anything resembling a meaningful answer:
        http://svpow.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/what-actually-is-elseviers-open-access-licence/

-- Mike.