[Open-access] [open-science] Nature Scientific Data platform and doing science with open data

Peter Murray-Rust pm286 at cam.ac.uk
Sat Apr 6 16:38:36 UTC 2013


On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 5:10 PM, Tom Morris <tfmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 6:08 PM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>>
>>  If tthe scientific community (Wellcome, NIH, NSF, RCUK, etc.) is arguing
>> for CC-BY then it's irresponsible (at best) for NPG to do otherwise.
>>
>
> Can you expand on why you believe this?
>

Because I believe that in scientific publishing there is an implied
commitment from both sides to behave in a mututally constructive manner. If
you argue that the morals and practices of STM publishers should emulate
banks, energy companies, etc  in trying to make as much money as possible,
creating confusion, and offering flawed deals then I concede your argument.

I have published for years with publishers who behave in a reasonable
manner (BMC, PLoS) who offer CC-BY publication without prevarication and
confusion. They label their products coherently. Meanwhile the mainstream
publishers are sowing confusion and actively fighting and lobbying against
us. Many publishers have argued against content-mining, for example and
CC-NC is deliberately used to prevent it.

Remember that this is an asymmetric deal. Almost all the publishers' value
is GIVEN by academia. It is responsible to give reasonable value in return,
not try to grab more.

Yes,  you probably think I'm looking back to a golden age (which never
existed). But if STM publishing has descended to a dog-eat-dog fight we are
not serving the people of the world.

I shall be blogging on this.


Personally, I think it would be extraordinarily unlikely for all parties in
> a multi-party negotiation to have their interests perfectly aligned.
>  Typically each party argues for their own interest.
>
> Tom
>



-- 
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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