I'm no expert on human nature, but my guess is that future historians
of the OA movement will note that it was Green OA mandates that
eventually got OA to prevail on our planet (if it ever does prevail!)
in practice, and not the litany of pious but passive declarations of
principle inspired worldwide by the "Bethesda Statement Statement on
Open Access Publishing" (sic) (of which the Berlin Declaration was
largely a verbatim clone; it was Bethesda that first began
systematically equating OA exclusively with Gold OA publishing, and
conflating Green OA self-archiving with preservation-archiving). It
was not until Berlin 3 that mandates were even mentioned in the
Berlin context. (I note that there is not a hint of (Bethesda)
proposition 2, below, in the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which
first defined OA and was a true milestone.)
It all did turn out to be a matter of keystrokes in the end, but the
Bethesda/Berlin... series mobilized the keystrokes to sign abstract
statements with no commitment to any concrete action, whereas the
institutional and funder mandates are at last beginning to mobilize
the keystrokes to provide OA. It is perhaps consistent that those who
were more enamored of principles than practice would focus on the
potential preservation of the (nonexistent) OA content, whereas those
who were more enamored of practice would insist on the actual
provision of the content. (But the truth is that archiving was always
conceived as nothing more than the preservation dimension of Gold OA
publishing by the framers of the Bethesda Statement -- despite the
lonely dissenting voice of Peter Suber.)
Stevan Harnad
On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 10:05 PM, Klaus Graf
<klausgraf_at_googlemail.com> wrote:
May I remember to the Berlin declaration which is
defining what an OA
contribution is:
"Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions:
1. [...]
2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental
materials,
including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an
appropriate
standard electronic format is deposited (and thus
published) in at
least one online repository using suitable technical
standards (such
as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and
maintained by
an academic institution, scholarly society, government
agency, or
other well-established organization that seeks to enable
open access,
unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and
LONG-TERM ARCHIVING"
(my emphasis).
Thus it is clear that preservation is an important issue
for the OA
community including authors. Many humanities scholars are
sceptic
against electronic publishing because in their view "true
publishing"
is publishing on paper with long-term guarantee.
Dr. Klaus Graf, archivist at RWTH Aachen University
http://archiv.twoday.net
Received on Tue Jul 22 2008 - 05:51:48 BST