Re: Well-Meaning Supporters of "OA + X" Inadvertently Opposing OA

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 02:49:51 +0100

    Prior AmSci Thread:
    Well-Meaning Supporters of "OA + X" Inadvertently Opposing OA
    http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/5927.html

On Thu, 10 May 2007, Armbruster, Chris wrote:

> With the White Paper "Author and Publishing Rights for Academic Use:
> An Appropriate Balance", publishers are preparing legal and policy moves
> to undermine the OA mandates recently agreed by a number of funding
> agencies. In doing so, they evidently plan to go much further and,
> if possible, to revoke all permissions to archive and post any form
> of post-print.

(1) Publishers are not a monolith: As they do now, some publishers will
endorse immediate OA self-archiving and some will not.

    http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php

(2) The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate, coupled with
the Fair Use Button, is completely immune to publishers' policies or
endorsements, one way or another.

    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
    http://www.eprints.org/news/features/request_button.php

> in a recent paper I argue that nonexclusive licensing is the way
> forward in the dissemination and certification of research articles
> and data.
> http://research.yale.edu/isp/eventsa2k2.html

Nonexclusive licensing is fine if/when an author can successfully
negotiate it. Until/unless all authors do, ID/OA mandates are needed, now.

> If research funders, universities and research organisations adopted
> a policy of nonexclusive licensing for research articles and data, this
> would pre-empt any threat from publishers now and in future. Furthermore,
> it would benefit the advancement of science and the knowledge-based
> society.

And until/less research funders, universities and research organisations
agree to adopt nonexclusive licensing, they can and should immediately
adopt ID/OA mandates.

> pressure for the "digital doubling" of research articles in OA
> repositories (so-called green road) is misguided and OA publishing
> (so-called gold road) has no future outside biomedicine.

Actually, it is Green self-archiving mandate pressure that is working,
where it is being applied, and the call to try instead to renegotiate
licensing rights instead that is misguided -- as is any measure that
is stronger and less probable than what is necessary (and already in
motion).

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    http://roar.eprints.org/

Stevan Harnad
Received on Fri May 11 2007 - 03:20:02 BST

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