[Open-access] Unhelpful post from Heather Morrison

Tue Feb 14 12:46:15 UTC 2012

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 9:38 AM, Mike Taylor <mike at indexdata.com> wrote:

> 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."
>
> We all agree that CC-NC-SA is not BOAI-compliant. Beware of my
generalizations but many statements in OA tend to be political rather than
logical. I have suffered a lot because I ask logical questions and give
logical answers and there is a large community who doesn't worry about
contradictions and inaccuracies.

I have found this in trying to work out what I can and can't do about
text-mining and get responses (this from Stevan Harnad) "data-crunch green
OA as much as you like". This is a meaningless, semi-illiterate response in
that text != data and no wild assurancies free you from legal constraints.
So in my experience the "Green" branch of OA is riddled with
inconsistencies, lack of information, etc.

> 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/
>
> The worst licences are the home-grown ones - try and work out what you can
legally do from, say, the RSC page on "Open Science". (That's another
problem - every publisher uses different terms).

My suggestion is that at present we:
* list the advantages of formal @ccess-compliance
* provide stories of user success and frustration
* discover more @ccess-compliant  resources
* build automated ingestion and annotaion

So I think we should concentrate on the positive and only change the
details of current practice where it is likely to succeed. For example we
might prepare a universal approach to mailing all non-compliant publishers

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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