On Wed, 9 Apr 2008, Klaus Graf wrote:
> How many people must die because an OA guru says "There is a
> need to update BBB" and denies the need of re-use?
Ummm, a bit shrill! But here's my (6-step) answer:
(1) We have neither price-freedom nor permission-freedom today. (So
if people are dying because of that, they're dying.)
(2) I am as sure as I am of anything (short of Cartesian certainty)
that universal price-freedom (Green OA) not only fulfills most of
the immediate needs of researchers, but that it is also the fastest
and surest way of eventually achieving permission-freedom too (let's
call that Gold OA, for simplicity -- it's not, but it'll do).
(3) Now price-freedom can be achieved by self-archiving, and
self-archiving can be (and is being) mandated.
(4) Insisting now on wrapping permission-freedom into the mandate
(copyright-retention) makes it much more difficult and much less
likely that consesnus will be reached to adopt a mandate at all --
and if adopted, this stronger p&p mandate seems to require an opt-out
option as a compromise (as in Harvard's p&p mandate), which means it
is no longer a mandate at all, and compliance is not assured.
(5) But (as Peter Suber has very fully understood) I have no
reservations at all about stronger mandates (Green price-freedom
plus Gold permission-freedom mandates) *if they can be successfully
agreed upon, adopted, implemented and fulfilled*. More is always
better than less if it can indeed be had; more is only an obstacle
if it stands in the way of the less that is already within reach.
(6) Harvard's p&p copyright-retention mandate, with an opt-out, is
not a mandate. If it nevertheless proves, in 3 years, to deliver
nearly 100% p&p OA, then it will be a success (and I will have
been wrong). If not, then yet another 3 years will have been lost
by needlessly over-reaching -- because we already know that weaker
Green deposit (price-freedom) mandates, without opt-out, deliver
nearly 100% (Green) OA within 3 years. (And if Harvard's p&p mandate
is widely imitated in the meanwhile, instead of a deposit mandate,
without even knowing whether it is destined to succeed or fail,
then a lot more years of OA will be needlessly lost.)
So "How many people must die"? You think fewer if we over-reach, trying
unnecessarily for both price-freedom and permission-freedom in the same
swoop, at the risk of getting neither. I think fewer if we first grasp
what is already within our reach, because it is not only sure to give us
most of what we want and need immediately (price-freedom), but it is also
the most likely way to get the rest (permission-freedom) thereafter too.
(By the way, if we don't update BBB, then Green OA is not OA, and Green
OA mandates are not providing what they say and think they are
providing, but something else. Nor have I been talking about OA for a
decade and a half now, but about something else. "If this be error and
upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved...")
"Kripke (1980) gives a good example of how "gold" might be baptized
on the shiny yellow metal in question, used for trade, decoration and
discourse, and then we might discover "fool's gold," which would make
all the sensory features we had used until then inadequate, forcing us
to find new ones. He points out that it is even possible in principle
for "gold" to have been inadvertently baptized on "fool's gold"! Of
interest here are not the ontological aspects of this possibility,
but the epistemic ones: We could bootstrap successfully to real gold
even if every prior case had been fool's gold. "Gold" would still be
the right word for what we had been trying to pick out all along,
and its original provisional features would still have provided a
close enough approximation to ground it, even if later information
were to pull the ground out from under it, so to speak."
http://arxiv.org/html/cs/9906002
Amen.
Stevan Harnad
On Wed, 9 Apr 2008, Klaus Graf wrote:
> http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/386-Dont-Risk-Getting-Le
> ss-By-Needlessly-Demanding-More.html
>
> Peter Suber has answered at
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/04/price-and-permission-barriers-a
> gain.html
>
> Peter Murray-Rust (and I) have often argued that permission barriers
> must be removed. See e.g.
>
> http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4409408/
> http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4356023/ (and earlyer posts)
>
> See also
> MacCallum CJ (2007) When Is Open Access Not Open Access? PLoS Biol
> 5(10): e285 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050285
>
> On the recent discussion on textmining and PubMedCentral:
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/04/text-mining-licensed-non-oa-lit
> erature.html
> http://researchremix.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/non-oa-full-text-for-text-mi
> ning/
> http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=1026
>
> Harnad writes: "OA is free online access. With that comes,
> automatically, the individual capability of linking, reading,
> downloading, storing, printing off, and data-mining (locally)."
>
> "Data-mining (locally)" is nonsense. If I have to mine 1000 articles
> and are allowed to downlad automatically 10 articles/day I have to
> wait 100 days.
>
> Harnad repeats his ideas as mantras. We can do the same:
>
> FAIR USE IS NOT ENOUGH.
>
> There are scholars and scientists outside the U.S. under more rigid
> copyright regimes without Fair Use.
>
> Let's have a closer look on the German Copyright law:
>
> http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__53.html
>
> It is allowed to make copies for scholarly use if and only if
> (i) there are good reasons
> and
> (ii) there is no commercial goal ("keinen gewerblichen Zwecken dient").
>
> In my humble opinion medical research in a pharma business is
> (i) research according BBB
> (ii) commercial.
>
> A scientist in this company may according German law (since January 1,
> 2008) NOT
> (i) make copies of scholarly articles (§ 53 Abs. 2 Nr. 2 UrhG) for
> scholarly use
> (ii) data-mining.
>
> On the problems of the new commercial clausula for universities
> ("Drittmittelforschung") see (in German) the position of the
> Urheberrechtsbündnis:
> http://www.dfn.de/fileadmin/3Beratung/Recht/Expertise-3-korb-urhg.pdf
>
> § 53 Abs. 2 Nr. 4 allows him making copies (of some articles in a
> journal issue) on paper or for non-digital use only. Because data
> mining needs digital use our German pharma scientist has only a chance
> to mine the CC-BY subset of OA publications (most hybrid journals have
> AFAIK CC-BY-NC).
>
> (i) OA is important for all researchers (including commercial research).
> (ii) Commercial medical research is important for world's health problems.
> (iii) Data-mining is a new scientific way to solve medical problems.
> (iii) Business companies engaged in commercial research cannot and
> will not afford journal licenses for large-scale data-mining.
>
> (SCNR: How many people must die because an OA guru says "There is a
> need to update BBB" and denies the need of re-use?)
>
> There is a simple solution (I will repeat it because it is important
> like a mantra):
>
> * MAKE ALL RESEARCH RESULTS CC-BY
> * MAKE ALL RESEARCH RESULTS CC-BY
> * MAKE ALL RESEARCH RESULTS CC-BY
>
> Klaus Graf
Received on Thu Apr 10 2008 - 00:22:13 BST