On 2011-01-16, at 1:10 PM, Marius Kempe wrote:
On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 4:59 PM, Stevan Harnad
<[email protected]> wrote:
(1) "Scientific texts" includes monograph, textbooks and journal
articles: one size does not fit all.
It's true of course that it doesn't currently. However, I don't see any
difference between the moral arguments for making textbooks and monographs
open and making journal articles open; in an ideal world, all writings by
publicly funded researchers on the topic of their research (and teachers
on the topic of their teaching) would be open.
Are we talking about an ideal world or the real world? In an ideal world, people
don't make quarrel or make war, there are no conflicts of interest, everyone is
well fed, no one exploits anyone else, etc. etc.Â
Easy to fantasize -- hard to describe a credible practical path from here to
there...
Â
(2) Open Access (OA) only concerns refereed journal articles
(because
they are all, without exception, author giveaways, written
solely for
usage and impact, not royalty revenues: books are not).
I understand that this is the way it is currently used in practice today.
However, see my answer to (1). I understand from anecdotal evidence that
monograph royalties tend to be low to nonexistent, but textbooks do bring
in considerable money. Thus monographs would be the easier kind of book to
change to open access models, since people would save a lot of money not
buying the monographs, and savings could even be funneled back into
researcher's salaries.
Yup, but journal articles would be even easier, and authors aren't even making
them free online, let alone public domain, so... ?
(3) OA comes in 2 "strengths": free online access ("Gratis
OA") and free
online access plus certain additional re-use rights (from the
weakest to
the strongest CC license, and even up to public domain)
("Libre OA")
(4) Most refereed journal articles (85%) are not yet even
Gratis OA, and
it is proving very hard to get authors to provide even that
much (hence
the Green OA mandate movement).
Yes, it is shocking. I fully support Green OA mandates; kudos to all your
work on the matter.
But if you want to help, don't ask authors for more when they aren't yet even
giving less...
Â
(5) Asking for more is not only premature, but risks not even
getting
Gratis OA.
So why is this hypothetical question about "whether scientific
texts... should be put into the public domain" being asked at
this time?
Who is asking whom? And who is offering (or listening)?
This is the crux of the matter, obviously. In the first instance, I am
asking the question, because I am offering to - I wrote it down mainly as
a way to find out whether or not I should put my research products in the
public domain. As for who is being asked, there has been a fair discussion
on the OKFN Open Science mailing list
(see http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-science/2011-January/thread.html),
and even one person so far who has started using the public domain because
of it.
The problem isn't the authors who want to make their texts free online (or even
public domain): They can just go ahead and do it. The problem is the vast
majority who don't even do the former, let alone want the latter.
Of course, those points don't directly answer your concern about
Libre OA initiatives taking away the steam from Gratis OA ones. Let
me get personal here, if the mailing list will excuse the informal
tone. I'm a 21 year old first-year PhD student. In society's eyes, I
am lowly; I cannot influence open access legal policy, institutional
mandates, or even the practices of others within my university
department. However, I fully expect to be interested in scientific
research until the end of my life; given medical advances, perhaps
up to 100 years from now. Thus, naturally, my interest gravitates
towards working out the long-term foundations of completely open
science, which is both something I'm interested in and something I
can practically influence. To reply to your central concern: why not
'let a thousand flowers bloom'? A discussion about the
appropriateness of the public domain does not detract from your
(highly laudable!) green OA mandate movement; but it might well help
some people - tenured professors with nothing to lose, private
researchers whose employment doesn't depend on publication counts,
amateur reseachers, idealistic open scientists - to move to an even
better model while the rest of the world slowly catches up.
If I had a penny for every time I've gotten the 1000 flowers reply!
The reason is the noise and confusion. If most people are not yet even planting
wheat for their daily bread, it's probably best not to distract them with the
public benefits of cultivating orchids pro bono...
To anyone interested in the promotion of Libre OA, I am currently
drafting a set of principles for publishing scientific writing,
modelled on the Panton Principles, at http://typewith.me/p4bdOCBD18.
I'd be very grateful for help and feedback.
Before putting too much time and energy into that, you might wish to look at how
students could really help accelerate OA growth:
http://www.openstudents.org/2008/02/08/open-students-oa-for-the-next-generation
Stevan
