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

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

     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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Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html