[Open-access] Letter to publishers - URGENT

Mon Mar 5 10:45:01 UTC 2012

On 5 March 2012 10:38, Douglas Carnall <dougie.carnall at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5 March 2012 09:51, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> We assert that subscribers [1] have an absolute right to use machines to
>> extract facts [2] from the scholarly literature in all forms [3]  in
>> arbitrarily large amounts [4] whenever they wish [5] and publish the output
>> as CC0 [6].
>
> Your footnotes make your actual intention clear, but when I first read
> this sentence I thought "this sounds like a recipe for crashing
> servers;" or at least that's one possible interpretation for the
> "absolute right" to extract as "large amounts" of information
> "whenever."
>
> I think you could address this potential criticism by deleting the
> word "absolute" [very few rights are indeed so, sigh]

Agreed -- this small change would make a big difference to the
perceived tone without actually affecting the meaning.

> and inserting an
> additional footnote after the word "right" that makes clear that you
> of course intend that you (and everyone else exercising the right) be
> a good internet citizen. Cameron's point about respect[ing] "API
> service limits where posted and develop[ing] polite tooling with
> exponential back-off where appropriate" could serve as a basis for the
> footnote.

I agree that a note should be inserted to this effect.  But I think
you should avoid trying to integrate (any version of) Cameron's text
detailing what that means.  This is an email about principles, not
implementation, and in this context it suffices to say we intend to
play nice.  (Otherwise we're just inviting the publishers to get into
a lot of irrelevant detail about what they consider a suitable
exponential back-off factor to be.)  We want this to be short, sweet,
instantly comprehensible, and incapable of misinterpretation.

> The Un*x command that allows users to prioritise kernel time between
> different users is called, fittingly, "nice," and I don't think it's
> quite good enough to say that the technical details don't concern you
> when proposing automated access to servers. After all, you couldn't
> abstract a chemistry article that day if it was bound in a volume that
> had been borrowed by another user.

I agree that we can't say technical details don't concern us.  But we
can say that they are not the subject of THIS discussion.  We can
recognise the importance of that separate discussion without getting
sucked into having it now.

> The current tone of your draft betrays the frustration you have
> experienced over the past few years, and while that is understandable
> to me as a list member here, a more even and temperate tone that
> acknowledges some of the potential practical difficulties would
> perhaps be more effective. Murmur gently in a voice of sweet reason...

Agreed.

There's a paradox there: only years of abuse can give rise to the
level of fury that makes letters like Peter's happen at all; but only
a more sober tone than such fury expresses can achieve all that we
hope.  So it's good that we have among us some people who have not yet
been pissed of quite so royally as Peter.

-- Mike.