[GOAL] Re: [BOAI] Meaning of Open Access
Dear All,
To me, Open Access implies unqualified free and unlimited access to all journal
contents for ALL interested readers/users, regardless of location and
resource-capacity.
Anything short of this no matter how qualified, seems restrictive and
prescriptive.
Dr. Uzodinma Adirieje
Executive
Director
Afrihealth
Information Projects/Afrihealth Optonet Association
Suite
216, Block G, FHA Cornershop, Lugbe, Airport Road, Abuja
P.O.
Box 8880, Wuse Abuja, Nigeria
Ph:
+234 802 856 2348; Mob: +234 803 472 5905
Emails:
covianige...@gmail.com, afrihealthoptonet...@yahoo.com
From: Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) goal@eprints.org
Cc: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk
Sent: Wednesday, May 9, 2012 11:37 AM
Subject: [BOAI] Meaning of Open Access
** Cross-Posted **
On 2012-05-09, at 4:12 AM, Jan Velterop wrote:
I would favour doing away with both the terms 'libre OA' and 'gratis OA'.
Open Access suffices. It's the 'open' that says it all. Especially if it is
made
clear that OA means BOAI-compliant OA in the context of scholarly
research literature.
I don't doubt that Jan would like to do away with the terms libre and gratis
OA.
He has been arguing all along that free online access is not open access,
ever since 2003 on the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#msg6478
This would mean that my subversive proposal of 1994 was not really a
proposal for open access and that the existing open access mandates
and policies of funders and institutions worldwide are not really open access
mandates or policies.
http://roarmap.eprints.org/
It is in large part for this reason that in 2008 Peter Suber and I proposed
the terms gratis and libre open access to ensure that the term
open access retained its meaning, and to make explicit the two
distinct conditions involved: free online access (gratis OA) and
certain re-use rights (libre OA):
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/04/strong-and-weak-oa.html
For Peter Murray-Rust's crusade for journal article text-mining rights,
apart from reiterating my full agreement that these are highly important
and highly desirable and even urgent in certain fields, I would like
to note that -- as PM-R has stated -- neither gratis OA nor libre OA
is necessary for the kinds of text-mining rights he is seeking. They
can be had via a special licensing agreement from the publisher.
There is no ambiguity there: The text-mining rights can be granted
even if the articles themselves are not made openly accessible,
free for all.
And, as Richard Poynder has just pointed out, publishers are
quite aware of (perhaps even relieved with) this option, with
Elsevier lately launching an experiment in it:
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/2012-May/000433.html
This makes it clear that the text-mining rights PM-R seeks can be
had without either sort of OA, gratis or libre...
Let us hope the quest for Open Access itself is not derailed in this
direction.
Stevan Harnad
On 9 May 2012, at 08:30, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 10:25 PM, Stevan Harnad amscifo...@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 3:23 PM, Jan Velterop velte...@gmail.com wrote:
JV So by all means, let legal measures play a role, but not at the expense
of lowering the bar to 'gratis' OA. If one believes in mandates, then there
is no reason why BOAI-compliant OA ('libre' in your [SH] lingo) should not
be mandated.
I'd like to suggest that the term libre OA be dropped. Gratis OA implies
freedom for anyone to read the manuscript somewhere. Libre OA imlies the
removal of some permission barriers but neither says which or how many.
Since Gratis OA has already required the removal of one permission barrier
(the permission being granted to post on the web, permanently) it can be
argued that all Gratis OA is ipso facto Libre OA.
This renders the term Unnecessary and confusiing, and allows many people and
organizations to imply they are granting rights and permissions beyond
GratisOA when they are not. If there are current examples where the use of
libreOA plays a useful role it would be useful to see them.
The only terms that make operational sense and are clear are Gratis OA and
BOAI-compliant OA . It is a pity that the latter is a long phrase and maybe
its usage will contract the phrase.
I would be grateful for clear discourse on these definitions and the
suggestion of retiring libreOA.
P.
--
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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[GOAL] Re: [BOAI] Meaning of Open Access
Jan: Not all articles in the Biomed Central journals are open access; some require a subscription. An example is BMC's Genome Biology http://genomebiology.com/content/13/4 which is a hybrid journal with both toll access and open access articles. Jeffrey Beall, Metadata Librarian / Assistant Professor Auraria Library University of Colorado Denver 1100 Lawrence St. Denver, Colo. 80204 USA (303) 556-5936 jeffrey.be...@ucdenver.edu [cid:image001.jpg@01CD2DBB.32CC3370] From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Jan Velterop Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2012 6:24 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Cc: boai-fo...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Subject: [GOAL] Re: [BOAI] Meaning of Open Access Andras, Whether Open Access relates to an individual article or to a whole journal depends on whether the journal calls itself an OA journal or whether the OA label is just attached to a few individual articles. Among the best examples we have are PLoS and BMC journals, all the articles in which are covered by a CC-BY licence, meaning they are full, BOAI-compliant Open Access, and you can do pretty much anything with them, including redistribute the whole journal, and converting articles into different formats, as long as you properly acknowledge the original author(s) whenever possible. Depending on the reason why you text-mine, of course, the value of text-mining increases, on the whole, with the size of the body of literature that you can text-mine. A whole journal is better than a single article, but a large amount of articles from different journals on the same topic is better still. The BOAI definition of Open Access allows text-mining. The appropriate licence covering BOAI-compliant Open Access is CC-BY. Jan On 9 May 2012, at 12:34, Andras Holl wrote: Dear All, The thing whether Open Access relates to an individual article or a whole journal is not clear. Does libre OA mean that anyone is free to redistribute the whole journal, or only one, a few article? Text mining rights are meaningful only for the whole journal. My opinion that they should be granted - the problem I have is not with the rights. It is with the practice. The OA journal I manage has every article available in several formats - LaTeX, PS. PDF, HTML - some of these are generated on-the-fly, some static. Indiscriminate harvesting is a prolem for me. What I would like to have is some method, which is a mix of robots.txt and htaccess, maybe with a touch of legal content about the scope of possible use of harvested content. So, in my opinion, the real worls situation is even more complex than either gratis or libre. There are many flavors of OA, and I do not think that sticking to the bOAI definition would do much good. Andras Holl On Wed, 9 May 2012 06:37:55 -0400, Stevan Harnad wrote ** Cross-Posted ** On 2012-05-09, at 4:12 AM, Jan Velterop wrote: I would favour doing away with both the terms 'libre OA' and 'gratis OA'. Open Access suffices. It's the 'open' that says it all. Especially if it is made clear that OA means BOAI-compliant OA in the context of scholarly research literature. I don't doubt that Jan would like to do away with the terms libre and gratis OA. He has been arguing all along that free online access is not open access, ever since 2003 on the American Scientist Open Access Forum: http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#msg6478 This would mean that my subversive proposal of 1994 was not really a proposal for open access and that the existing open access mandates and policies of funders and institutions worldwide are not really open access mandates or policies. http://roarmap.eprints.org/ It is in large part for this reason that in 2008 Peter Suber and I proposed the terms gratis and libre open access to ensure that the term open access retained its meaning, and to make explicit the two distinct conditions involved: free online access (gratis OA) and certain re-use rights (libre OA): http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/04/strong-and-weak-oa.html For Peter Murray-Rust's crusade for journal article text-mining rights, apart from reiterating my full agreement that these are highly important and highly desirable and even urgent in certain fields, I would like to note that -- as PM-R has stated -- neither gratis OA nor libre OA is necessary for the kinds of text-mining rights he is seeking. They can be had via a special licensing agreement from the publisher. There is no ambiguity there: The text-mining rights can be granted even if the articles themselves are not made openly accessible, free for all. And, as Richard Poynder has just pointed out, publishers are quite aware of (perhaps even relieved with) this option, with Elsevier lately launching an experiment in it: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/2012-May/000433.html This makes it clear that the text-mining rights PM-R
[GOAL] Re: [BOAI] Meaning of Open Access
Jeffrey, All research articles in BMC journals are OA, BOAI-compliant CC-BY. A few journals (six of them, to be precise, http://arthritis-research.com/ , http://breast-cancer-research.com/, http://ccforum.com/ ,http://genomebiology.com/ , http://genomemedicine.com/ , and http://stemcellres.com/ ) contain non-research articles, e.g. commissioned Reviews, Commentaries, Meeting reports, Viewpoints, and those articles – only those – are subject to a subscription charge. Jan On 9 May 2012, at 15:10, Beall, Jeffrey wrote: Jan: Not all articles in the Biomed Central journals are open access; some require a subscription. An example is BMC's Genome Biology http://genomebiology.com/content/13/4 which is a hybrid journal with both toll access and open access articles. Jeffrey Beall, Metadata Librarian / Assistant Professor Auraria Library University of Colorado Denver 1100 Lawrence St. Denver, Colo. 80204 USA (303) 556-5936 jeffrey.be...@ucdenver.edu image001.jpg From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Jan Velterop Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2012 6:24 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Cc: boai-fo...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Subject: [GOAL] Re: [BOAI] Meaning of Open Access Andras, Whether Open Access relates to an individual article or to a whole journal depends on whether the journal calls itself an OA journal or whether the OA label is just attached to a few individual articles. Among the best examples we have are PLoS and BMC journals, all the articles in which are covered by a CC-BY licence, meaning they are full, BOAI-compliant Open Access, and you can do pretty much anything with them, including redistribute the whole journal, and converting articles into different formats, as long as you properly acknowledge the original author(s) whenever possible. Depending on the reason why you text-mine, of course, the value of text-mining increases, on the whole, with the size of the body of literature that you can text-mine. A whole journal is better than a single article, but a large amount of articles from different journals on the same topic is better still. The BOAI definition of Open Access allows text-mining. The appropriate licence covering BOAI-compliant Open Access is CC-BY. Jan On 9 May 2012, at 12:34, Andras Holl wrote: Dear All, The thing whether Open Access relates to an individual article or a whole journal is not clear. Does libre OA mean that anyone is free to redistribute the whole journal, or only one, a few article? Text mining rights are meaningful only for the whole journal. My opinion that they should be granted - the problem I have is not with the rights. It is with the practice. The OA journal I manage has every article available in several formats - LaTeX, PS. PDF, HTML - some of these are generated on-the-fly, some static. Indiscriminate harvesting is a prolem for me. What I would like to have is some method, which is a mix of robots.txt and htaccess, maybe with a touch of legal content about the scope of possible use of harvested content. So, in my opinion, the real worls situation is even more complex than either gratis or libre. There are many flavors of OA, and I do not think that sticking to the bOAI definition would do much good. Andras Holl On Wed, 9 May 2012 06:37:55 -0400, Stevan Harnad wrote ** Cross-Posted ** On 2012-05-09, at 4:12 AM, Jan Velterop wrote: I would favour doing away with both the terms 'libre OA' and 'gratis OA'. Open Access suffices. It's the 'open' that says it all. Especially if it is made clear that OA means BOAI-compliant OA in the context of scholarly research literature. I don't doubt that Jan would like to do away with the terms libre and gratis OA. He has been arguing all along that free online access is not open access, ever since 2003 on the American Scientist Open Access Forum: http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#msg6478 This would mean that my subversive proposal of 1994 was not really a proposal for open access and that the existing open access mandates and policies of funders and institutions worldwide are not really open access mandates or policies. http://roarmap.eprints.org/ It is in large part for this reason that in 2008 Peter Suber and I proposed the terms gratis and libre open access to ensure that the term open access retained its meaning, and to make explicit the two distinct conditions involved: free online access (gratis OA) and certain re-use rights (libre OA): http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/04/strong-and-weak-oa.html For Peter Murray-Rust's crusade for journal article text-mining rights, apart from reiterating my full agreement that these are highly important and highly desirable
[GOAL] Re: [BOAI] Meaning of Open Access
In the BOAI, the content to which OA should apply is described as follows: The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment. Primarily, this category encompasses their peer-reviewed journal articles, but it also includes any unreviewed preprints that they might wish to put online for comment or to alert colleagues to important research findings. This is a handy page to keep at hand and to refer to: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm (unfortunately, the BOAI site itself, http://www.soros.org/openaccess, is often exceedingly slow and therefore difficult to consult if you don't have a lot of time). Jan On 9 May 2012, at 16:48, Peter Murray-Rust wrote: On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 4:11 PM, Jan Velterop velte...@gmail.com wrote: Jeffrey, All research articles in BMC journals are OA, BOAI-compliant CC-BY. A few journals (six of them, to be precise, http://arthritis-research.com/ , http://breast-cancer-research.com/, http://ccforum.com/ ,http://genomebiology.com/ , http://genomemedicine.com/ , and http://stemcellres.com/ ) contain non-research articles, e.g. commissioned Reviews, Commentaries, Meeting reports, Viewpoints, and those articles – only those – are subject to a subscription charge. Jan Thanks both of you, This is a good illustration that Open Content Mining does not necessarily all of the lierature to be fully CC-BY. It requires clear labelling of the subset that is BOAI-compliant. There is enough material - I believe - in BMC and PLoS papers to develop some useful science. And the toll-access journals will miss out on the citations. This is the problem with UK/PMC (as Casey Bergman and others have pointed out) - it is difficult to find the content that is minable other than BMC and PLoS. P. -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: [BOAI] Meaning of Open Access
Dear All, The thing whether Open Access relates to an individual article or a whole journal is not clear. Does libre OA mean that anyone is free to redistribute the whole journal, or only one, a few article? Text mining rights are meaningful only for the whole journal. My opinion that they should be granted - the problem I have is not with the rights. It is with the practice. The OA journal I manage has every article available in several formats - LaTeX, PS. PDF, HTML - some of these are generated on-the-fly, some static. Indiscriminate harvesting is a prolem for me. What I would like to have is some method, which is a mix of robots.txt and htaccess, maybe with a touch of legal content about the scope of possible use of harvested content. So, in my opinion, the real worls situation is even more complex than either gratis or libre. There are many flavors of OA, and I do not think that sticking to the bOAI definition would do much good. Andras Holl On Wed, 9 May 2012 06:37:55 -0400, Stevan Harnad wrote ** Cross-Posted ** On 2012-05-09, at 4:12 AM, Jan Velterop wrote: I would favour doing away with both the terms 'libre OA' and 'gratis OA'. Open Access suffices. It's the 'open' that says it all. Especially if it is made clear that OA means BOAI-compliant OA in the context of scholarly research literature. I don't doubt that Jan would like to do away with the terms libre and gratis OA. He has been arguing all along that free online access is not open access, ever since 2003 on the American Scientist Open Access Forum: http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#msg6478 This would mean that my subversive proposal of 1994 was not really a proposal for open access  and that the existing open access mandates and policies of funders and institutions worldwide are not really open access mandates or policies. http://roarmap.eprints.org/ It is in large part for this reason that in 2008 Peter Suber and I proposed the terms gratis and libre open access to ensure that the term open access retained its meaning, and to make explicit the two distinct conditions involved: free online access (gratis OA) and certain re-use rights (libre OA): http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/04/strong-and-weak-oa.html For Peter Murray-Rust's crusade for journal article text-mining rights, apart from reiterating my full agreement that these are highly important and highly desirable and even urgent in certain fields, I would like to note that -- as PM-R has stated -- neither gratis OA nor libre OA is necessary for the kinds of text-mining rights he is seeking. They can be had via a special licensing agreement from the publisher. There is no ambiguity there: The text-mining rights can be granted even if the articles themselves are not made openly accessible, free for all. And, as Richard Poynder has just pointed out, publishers are quite aware of (perhaps even relieved with) this option, with Elsevier lately launching an experiment in it: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/2012-May/000433.html This makes it clear that the text-mining rights PM-R seeks can be had without either sort of OA, gratis or libre... Let us hope the quest for Open Access itself is not derailed in this direction. Stevan Harnad --- - Andras Holl / Holl Andras         e-mail: h...@konkoly.hu Konkoly Observatory / MTA CsFK CsI    Tel.: +36 1 3919368 Fax: +36 1 2754668 IT manager / Szamitastechn. rendszervez. Mail: H1525 POBox 67, Budapest, Hungary --- - [ Part 2: Attached Text ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: [BOAI] Meaning of Open Access
Jan:  Not all articles in the Biomed Central journals are open access; some require a subscription.  An example is BMC's Genome Biology http://genomebiology.com/content/13/4 which is a hybrid journal with both toll access and open access articles.    Jeffrey Beall, Metadata Librarian / Assistant Professor Auraria Library University of Colorado Denver 1100 Lawrence St. Denver, Colo.  80204 USA (303) 556-5936 jeffrey.be...@ucdenver.edu  Description: Description:http://www.ucdenver.edu/about/departments/oiuc/brand/downloads/branddownloads/b randdocuments/Logos-E-mail%20Signatures/emailSig_2campus.png    From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Jan Velterop Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2012 6:24 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Cc: boai-fo...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Subject: [GOAL] Re: [BOAI] Meaning of Open Access  Andras,  Whether Open Access relates to an individual article or to a whole journal depends on whether the journal calls itself an OA journal or whether the OA label is just attached to a few individual articles. Among the best examples we have are PLoS and BMC journals, all the articles in which are covered by a CC-BY licence, meaning they are full, BOAI-compliant Open Access, and you can do pretty much anything with them, including redistribute the whole journal, and converting articles into different formats, as long as you properly acknowledge the original author(s) whenever possible.  Depending on the reason why you text-mine, of course, the value of text-mining increases, on the whole, with the size of the body of literature that you can text-mine. A whole journal is better than a single article, but a large amount of articles from different journals on the same topic is better still.  The BOAI definition of Open Access allows text-mining. The appropriate licence covering BOAI-compliant Open Access is CC-BY.  Jan   On 9 May 2012, at 12:34, Andras Holl wrote: Dear All, The thing whether Open Access relates to an individual article or a whole journal is not clear. Does libre OA mean that anyone is free to redistribute the whole journal, or only one, a few article? Text mining rights are meaningful only for the whole journal. My opinion that they should be granted - the problem I have is not with the rights. It is with the practice. The OA journal I manage has every article available in several formats - LaTeX, PS. PDF, HTML - some of these are generated on-the-fly, some static. Indiscriminate harvesting is a prolem for me. What I would like to have is some method, which is a mix of robots.txt and htaccess, maybe with a touch of legal content about the scope of possible use of harvested content. So, in my opinion, the real worls situation is even more complex than either gratis or libre. There are many flavors of OA, and I do not think that sticking to the bOAI definition would do much good. Andras Holl On Wed, 9 May 2012 06:37:55 -0400, Stevan Harnad wrote ** Cross-Posted ** On 2012-05-09, at 4:12 AM, Jan Velterop wrote: I would favour doing away with both the terms 'libre OA' and 'gratis OA'. Open Access suffices. It's the 'open' that says it all. Especially if it is made clear that OA means BOAI-compliant OA in the context of scholarly research literature. I don't doubt that Jan would like to do away with the terms libre and gratis OA. He has been arguing all along that free online access is not open access, ever since 2003 on the American Scientist Open Access Forum: http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#msg6478 This would mean that my subversive proposal of 1994 was not really a proposal for open access  and that the existing open access mandates and policies of funders and institutions worldwide are not really open access mandates or policies. http://roarmap.eprints.org/ It is in large part for this reason that in 2008 Peter Suber and I proposed the terms gratis and libre open access to ensure that the term open access retained its meaning, and to make explicit the two distinct conditions involved: free online access (gratis OA) and certain re-use rights (libre OA): http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/04/strong-and-weak-oa.html For Peter Murray-Rust's crusade for journal article text-mining rights, apart from reiterating my full agreement that these are highly important and highly desirable and even urgent in certain fields, I would like to note that -- as PM-R has stated -- neither gratis OA nor libre OA is necessary for the kinds of text-mining rights he is seeking. They can be had via a special licensing agreement from the publisher. There is no ambiguity there: The text-mining rights can be granted even if the articles themselves are not made openly accessible, free for all. And, as Richard Poynder has just pointed out, publishers are quite aware
