[Open-access] Unhelpful post from Heather Morrison

Tue Feb 14 13:28:11 UTC 2012

>* list the advantages of formal @ccess-compliance
>* provide stories of user success and frustration
Don't forget the web content sprint tomorrow from 2pm! We can hopefully get
some good things together on this.

>* discover more @ccess-compliant  resources
>* build automated ingestion and annotaion

While we're discovering more at ccess compliant resources, it might also be
good to combine some of the tools, ideas and data we already have to create
a database/permissions clarification request service (along the lines of
isitopendata.org) called isitopenaccess.org?

We could load it with as extensive a list of journals as we think
appropriate, input all the data from Ross' spreadsheet on permissions and
attempt to crowdsource more. There could also be a IIOD? style button so
the publisher can be contacted regarding unclear policies.

This would eventually allow faceted browsing by license/permission. It
performs a different role to the OpenBib based service at the article level.

It wouldn't be a trivial exercise but I think it could be quite useful as
it seems that at the moment it's not easy for scientists when deciding
where to publish to work out exactly how open access different journals
really are and it could be a helpful selection tool without forcing people
to visit every journal website individually.

Does anyone think this would be worthwhile and/or used? I'm really keen to
get all the great work Ross did more visible than on the googledoc where it
currently resides.

Jenny

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 12:46 PM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

>
>
> 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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>
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