[Open-access] Draft advocacy guide for libre open access?

Wed Oct 16 11:24:50 UTC 2013

On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Ahead of open access week next week, Michelle and I thought it would be
> useful to have a brief guide to 'libre' open access, distilling what this
> is, why it matters and how to advocate for it:
>
>
Brilliant idea (by "next week" you mean berlin 11?) . Are you going? Will
you be promoting this document there?

> We've started a brief draft here: http://bit.ly/libre-oa
>
> Might anyone be interested in helping with this? If so, it would be great
> if you could comment on the doc!
>

I feel passionately so I supposed I am required to comment :)

We need to make it clear that:
 * OKF-libre OA is critically important. An example is the EuPMC Open
subset whcih can be used for TDM (Text and Data mining - I call it
content-mining). We should always stress it's more than just text. We don't
even know how large the OA subset is because we don't know which docs are OA
* Anything less than OKF-libre (e.g. CC-NC, CC-ND, unlicensed) CANNOT be
used automatically. This reduces its value to near zero as the author has
to be contacted every document.
* Many organizations think CC-NC is a "good things" because it feels right.
This include university repositories. CC-NC policies do great harm and
almost no good
* many publishers do not understand the formal basis of OA and mislabel
their documents (e.g. "Creative Commons Attribution Licence which can be
used for Non-Commercial puposes" (from SAGE). We must insist that all
documents are explicitly labelled with formal licences. Stamps of "Open
Access paper " are virtually useless"
* the terminology of OA is fuzzy and NOT deducible from other Open
initiatives (e.g. FLOSS). OA-libre is not a useful term in practice
("removal of 'some' permission barriers" is not operable and defaults to
CC-NC-ND at best.
* All this matters. In particular it is almost impossible to make any
aggregated or indexed derivative works from the scientific literature.
* without formal legal licences readers making assumptions run the risk or
breaking copyright or contract law. The licences protect readers from being
taken to court.

P.

>
> All the best,
>
> Jonathan
>
> --
>
> Jonathan Gray
>
> Director of Policy and Ideas  | *@jwyg <https://twitter.com/jwyg>*
>
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-- 
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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