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Re: OA and copyright -- reading & copying

Anybody can define 'open access' the way he likes, of course, and we can easily get into endless semantic discussions about what exactly 'open access' means. It would be a pity if such a discussion distracted us from the spirit of open access that inspired the early advocates.

When, in December of 2001, an ad-hoc collection of open access initiators
came together in Budapest, the definition of what 'open access' meant was
quickly agreed, and most of the subsequent discussion was on strategy and
tactics regarding how to bring about open access as quickly as possible.

The reason why the definition was quickly agreed was because the prime
motivation of the participants was to make the research literature serve
science optimally, using whatever tools (such as the internet) were now
at the disposal of the scientific community to achieve that. And serving
science optimally clearly doesn't stop at mere access to read. Therefore
the definition (subsequently confirmed in essence by later conventions:
Bethesda and Berlin) didn't stop at just access.

The Budapest Declaration defines it as follows:

"By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its 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. The only
constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for
copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the
integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and
cited".

There is no need to dilute the definition of open access if one has
optimising the use that can be made of the research literature in mind.

Jan Velterop
www.biomedcentral.com

On 3 Jul 2004, at 16:19, Rick Anderson wrote:

Open access switches those, placing content protection behind the need
to make it as accessible as possible. I don't think the elimination of copyright follows.
I agree, and it's always been my impression that OA advocates generally
saw OA as an issue separate from copyright. Saying "anyone may read this
article without restriction" is not the same as saying "anyone may copy
redistribute, etc. this article without restriction." It's easy to see how the issues can become conflated, however.

Rick Anderson
rickand@unr.edu
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