On Mon, 14 Mar 2005, Imre Simon wrote: > what is needed is not a revision of this or that definition but an > unequivocal legal license by which the author permits the perpetual > distribution of his/her work and of derivative works on the > Internet. Immediately and irrevocably... > There is no such thing as a permanent access to anything.
Imre, I am afraid you are mixing up two distinct issues that are currently being discussed in this Forum: (1) One issue is the updating of the BOAI definition of OA, which currently has a loophole that would technically allow (using an exaggerated example in order to highlight the logical flaw, and the slippery slope:) a journal that makes all of its articles freely accessible online for one day, 10 years after publication, to call itself an "OA journal." "Is there any need for a universal Open Access label?" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3223.html This is because the BOAI definition forgot to make it explicit that OA must be immediate and permanent, not delayed or temporary. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml You (and others) are quite right, however, that this definition cannot and should not be a pre-emptive stipulation about failsafe forms of digital preservation, because they do not yet even exist! "Irrevocably" might be a bit too stentorian, but something along the lines of "made freely accessible with no intention to of being withdrawn from free access at some later date" would make it clear that it is not the infallibility of preservation measures that is being invoked by the definition of OA, but that planned withdrawal from free online access is not OA. I don't think it is necessary to make it any more legalistic than that, as, in order to protect the term "OA" from misconstrual, misapplication, and misuse, it is the *spirit* of OA that it is necessary to convey clearly -- that the free access is meant to be immediate and permanent -- not some technical formalization of the *letter* of OA. That is all that is needed in order to avoid the slippery slope of delayed or temporary access posing as OA by invoking the BOAI definition. (2) The second, semi-orthogonal issue, is whether OA requires a Creative Commons (CC) license or its equivalent. I would say that the answer is definitely not. A CC license is always useful and desirable, and most OA journals use a CC license or equivalent. But that pertains only to the Golden Road to OA (i.e., publishing one's articles in an OA journal). But the Golden Road is the narrower, slower, and more uncertain of the *two* roads to OA. Only 5% of journals today are Gold. For the remaining 95% of articles, published in non-OA journals, the only OA option is self-archiving. 92% of journals are Green (i.e., have given their official green light to author self-archiving). It would not only be unnecessary, but a colossal mistake to imply, gratuitously, that the authors of all those articles must first successfully negotiate something like the CC license with those publishers, before they can make their articles OA through self-archiving! Now it is already proving hard enough to induce sluggish authors to go ahead and self-archive when the going is green: To impose on them (by *definition*!) the further entirely superfluous task of having to try to successfully negotiate a CC license with their publishers would be to make the otherwise broad, fast and sure green road into an even narrower, slower and more uncertain one than the golden one -- and for no reason at all! The gold publishers that do exist today (5%) have indeed voluntarily converted to something like a CC License allowing permanent free online access to all their contents. One can assume that the remaining 95% are not inclined to make that conversion; yet 92% of them *have* already given their authors the green light to self-archive. Why on earth would one now want to handicap authors with having to go back and haggle with them, needlessly, for still more, instead of just going ahead and doing it! In other words, there is absolutely no need for a CC license for 92% of journal articles. (Nor is it needed for the remaining 8% either http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#copyright-transfer-forbids -- but let's set that aside and focus on the 92%, to get the priorities and the probabilities into proportion.) One need only self-archive them to make them OA. But one *does* need to self-archive them immediately -- and with no intention or obligation to withdraw them: and that is the point of (1) above. > what is needed is the articulation of a social movement by which authors > get sufficiently motivated to give top priority to the use of said license > (or one of a set of said licenses) in publishing their works... > This might sound very far fetched but I would like to call your > attention that some authors are making progress along these legal lines More important than being far-fetched to expect authors to want to try, and publishers to want to comply, it is not *necessary*. Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Threads: Re: Free Access vs. Open Access (2003) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3281.html Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ To join or leave the Forum or change your subscription address: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-1 ("green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal http://romeo.eprints.org/ OR BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a open-access journal if/when a suitable one exists. http://www.doaj.org/ AND in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article in your institutional repository. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://archives.eprints.org/