[Open-access] german docs on open access

Fri May 4 13:58:34 UTC 2012

On 4 May 2012 14:54, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>> So implicit vs. explicit, like gratis vs. libre, is orthogonal to
>> green vs. gold.  And while we would all agree that explicit is better
>> than implicit and libre is better than gratis, I am still not seeing
>> an *intrinsic* reason for strongly preferring green over gold.
>
> Proper libre (as in F/OSS not the Suber-Harnad misuse) requires an explicit
> statement of freedom.

Well.  The phrase "libre OA" was coined by the Suber/Harnad menu, so
they get to define what that means.  Adding our own term "proper libra
OA" will only exacerbate the confusion.  I think Tom's approach is
better: recognise that the meaning of "libre OA" is so vague as to be
useless, and explicitly say BOAI-compliant, or @ccess, instead.

(Honestly, what was Peter thinking?  It's bad enough that that memo
watered down the meaning of OA by introducing gratis to the
conversation; but ALSO watering down libre to mean less and OA itself
meant in the original coinage -- that was a seriously wrongheaded
manoeuvre.)

>> Of course it may well be the case that green is more often implicit
>> about terms than gold is; and that would certainly be something to fix
>> about those specific green repositories.  But it's not the fault of
>> green itself.  Correlation does not imply causality.
>
> The problem is we are dealing with the result fo 10 years of misuse of
> terminology. That makes it very difficult to use the terminology to describe
> the problem. While we make be correct in what we say, many people will not
> understand us correctly.

True.  This is why I have adopted the term "BOAI-compliant" for more purposes.

> We discussed at one stage trying to reclaim usage. I am not hopeful of doing
> this while the main players confuse issues. By all means we can describe
> what we mean in the current terms..

Yes.

-- Mike.