I might be convinced by his core argument, and quite possibly other people on this list as well, if Stevan cum suis could come up with credible evidence that in order to get universities and funders to mandate deposit in what they call OA-repositories requires watering down OA and not sticking to what OA was meant to be according to the BOAI.
Why would potentially mandating organisations be more likely to mandate OA if it were watered-down to 'gratis' OA instead of BOAI-compliant OA? What are the dangers averted or the gains won by watering down OA from how it was defined in the BOAI? If institutions and funders go through the trouble of mandating, would they really knowingly settle for second best? Of course, any access is better than no access, but by that reckoning striving for what has been called 'delayed OA', opening up the literature after a few years or so, is quite likely the strategy with the best chance of quick success. I haven't seen the notion of immediacy feature in this discussion, so Stevan c.s. may not find it important, and because it isn't mentioned in the BOAI either (it became prominent in the later Bethesda Statement on OA – http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm), that may be a route to go with more chance of speedy success than the current mandate strategy. And if delayed OA is then full OA, including the re-use rights mentioned in the BOAI, then that might even be the better solution. (Those re-use right were formulated as follows: "free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.") Having a watered-down form of 'open' with regard to access (relative to the BOAI, for most of us the real starting point of serious OA), gives us a scientific information landscape where everybody can start digging for knowledge, anywhere, but that remains closed for any larger-scale analyses (if we're taking the landscape metaphor, aerial surveys and the like) unless permission has been obtained, which is perhaps on offer, but likely to be obtainable only by negotiation, publisher by publisher, and therefore unworkable. Jan On 10 May 2012, at 07:59, Richard Poynder wrote: > So what is really at issue is whether Green Gratis OA is indeed not > "meaningful" enough to warrant "lowering the bar" in order to mandate it. > > According to Jan, it is not. > > According to me, it most definitely is: in fact, it is the first and > foremost reason for providing OA at all. > > What do other GOAL and JISC readers think? > >>> > > There are times when the best that can be achieved is that people agree to > disagree. I think this is one of those times. > > Richard Poynder > > > _______________________________________________ > GOAL mailing list > GOAL@eprints.org > http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
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