[Open-access] [okfn-discuss] Problems of nomenclature

Sat Mar 3 12:38:48 UTC 2012

Thanks Chris - I share many of your concerns.

The unfortunate thing is that many people use terms in fuzzy or casual
manner (and some, I believe, deliberately misuse them for marketing
purposes (e.g. "fully open" meaning "visible" without rights). That is why
the OKD is so important.

On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 12:04 PM, Chris Sakkas <sanglorian at gmail.com> wrote:

>  Hi folks,
>
>  I’ve been trying to sort out the Wikipedia pages relating to IP
> minimalism (libre, Creative Commons, copyright reform, etc.). However, I’ve
> run into terminology problems for works, licences and concepts that
> straddle the free/libre-semi-free/semi-libre boundary.
>
>  My first problem is that I don’t have a term to describe libre AND
> semi-libre licences that have a copyleft-like condition.
>
>  What is "semi-libre"?

In the Open Access community Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad have defined
"libre" as "the removal of some permission barriers". I think this is
highly regrettable and we ran into this problem on  the OKF open-access
list. I believed (wrongly) that libre was well-defined - it isn't. The
removal of just one small barrier means that the mainstream "Open Access"
community will call an artefact "libre". For example allowing someone to
put their article into a repository named by a publisher could be described
as libre.

For that reason we feel that "libre" has been devalued. The only useful
definition in OA are the BBB defintions of which BOAI is the commonest
used. Thus while I would like to use "libre" I am forced to say
"BOAI-compliant".

Although "libre" is clear in software terms I suspect the muddiness of use
in "Open Access" - itself now a virtually meaningless term - will spread to
other information artefacts.

If you use a term, PLEASE, PLEASE provide a definition as nothing is
logical.

-- 
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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