[Open-access] A publisher writes...

[Mike Taylor]

On 12 March 2012 13:53, Richard Kidd <KiddR at rsc.org> wrote:
> Hi Mike
>
> But the communication says
>
> "Unfortunately any other reply than YES by 2012-03-15 will be regarded as unacceptable for the purposes of Hargreaves."
>
> Which is all about a specific stance, isn't it?

Well, in the sense that Peter's stance is that he wants assurances
that he is free to mine resources that his institution has paid for
access to, yes, I suppose.  His problem is that for the last three
years, his attempts to ask the yes-or-no question "may I proceed?"
have been repeatedly met with every kind of answer BUT yes or no --
things like "we should set up a conference call to discuss your
needs".  But that's ultimately no good to him -- it won't scale.  So
from his perspective it really is as simple as a binary choice between
"yes" and "other",

And an important point that publishers are mostly not getting (or at
least they talk as if they're not getting it) is that this is how it's
going to be for most would-be miners.  When running into an answer
other than Yes or No, most people are either going to walk away from
the project, or make do with a smaller corpus for which the terms ARE
clear.  And that doesn't benefit ANYONE.

> The only data is whether we agree with a request to mine, yes or no, and is put in the context of showing Hargreaves the benefits of mining. So as an information gathering exercise on policy I'm not sure it'll work.

Well, for gathering the information of whether publishers say "yes" or
something different, it's perfect.  And since that's the only answer
Peter cares about it, it's hardly surprising that it's the question
he's asking.

-- Mike.