Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Charles W. Bailey, Jr.]

In spite of my saying that I would give Stevan the last
word, I'll add one clarification:  It was not my intent to
imply that Stevan had not made major tangible contributions
to OA in the form of his many invaluable software and other
projects.  Nor was I trying to imply that Stevan had not
made major theoretical or other contributions to OA, or that
OA was not "real work."  Nothing could be further
from the truth.  Since my posting can be read that way, I
offer my apologies.


Best Regards,
Charles

Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Assistant Dean for Digital Library
Planning and Development, University of Houston,
Library Administration, 114 University Libraries,
Houston, TX 77204-2000.  E-mail: cbai...@uh.edu.
Voice: (713) 743-9804.  Fax: (713) 743-9811.
DigitalKoans: http://www.escholarlypub.com/digitalkoans/
Open Access Bibliography: http://info.lib.uh.edu/cwb/oab.htm
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 
http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog: http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepw.htm

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

 Prior AmSci Topic Thread:
 "Free Access vs. Open Access" (began August, 2003)
 http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2956.html

OA: NO CUES FROM THE P'S

Stevan Harnad

For those without the time to work through the details, the punch-line is
this:

What research and researchers need, now, is toll-free, immediate,
permanent, webwide, online access to the full-text of all 2.5 million
articles published annually in the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed
journals.

That is is what is (or ought to be) meant by "Open Access" (OA) (and
it is certainly all I've ever meant by it -- and I've been at it a lot
longer than the day some of us coined that term for the "BOAI" after
Budapest in 2001!).

Librarians have been concerned about journal pricing, permissions and
preservation (including digital preservation) -- the 3 P's -- for a
long time too. But those P concerns had *nothing* whatsoever to do with OA
before, and they still have nothing to do with OA now -- except that, if
willfully *conflated* with OA, they can help embargo OA for yet another
decade.

(One of the many ways to willfully conflate the P's with OA is what
Charles has proposed: to co-opt the original meaning of a "Green"
journal -- a code coined to refer to journals that give their Green
Light to author self-archiving -- and use it instead to mean "Open
Access Journals," for which the already proposed and used color code
had been "Gold". This effectively washes out self-archiving, and instead
re-focusses everything on the three P's.)

As I said, one cannot legislate either tastes or colors, so I shall simply
try to show where and how both Charles Bailey and the library community
are missing the point and blocking progress on OA if they try to force
OA into their Procrustean bed of P's, thereby unwittingly helping to
delay and deny to the research user community the access to the content
they so urgently need today, to delay and deny to the research author
community the usage and impact that they are now needlessly losing, daily,
monthly, yearly, and to delay and deny to research itself the potential
productivity and progress that is all being still-born currently,
owing to the absence of toll-free, immediate, permanent, webwide, online
access to all article full-texts. And all this in the name of the library
community's all-important three P's: Pricing, Permissions, Preservation.

On Mon, 16 May 2005, Charles W. Bailey, Jr. wrote:

> Stevan Harnad has commented extensively on my "The Spectrum
> of E-Journal Access Policies: Open to Restricted Access"
> DigitalKoans posting.
>
> http://www.escholarlypub.com/digitalkoans/2005/05/13/the-spectrum-of-e-journal-access-policies-open-to-restricted-access/
> http://www.escholarlypub.com/digitalkoans/2005/05/16/is-the-access-spectrum-a-red-herring-or-are-green-and-gold-too-black-and-white/
>
> First, let me concede that if you look at this question from
> Stevan's particular open-access-centric point of view that,
> of course, the spectrum of publisher access policies is a
> complete and utter waste of time.

Translation: If you are concerned with OA instead of the 3 P's, the 3 P's
will look like a waste of time: No, the 3 P's are not a waste of time.
They are just *irrelevant to OA* and should cease to be conflated with
it, to OA's cost.

> I don't recall suggesting
> that this was a new open access model per se, even though it
> includes open access in it as a component and it makes some
> further distinctions between open access and free access
> journals.

Charles did not propose it as a new OA model; he simply chose to code
journals in terms of their "degree of OA" and to use a highly complicated,
particolored journal code that not only clashed with the simple two-color
journal code -- which had been designed specifically to claify things
and bring them into focus (OA Journals: Gold; Journals endorsing OA
self-archiving by authors: Green) -- but reassigned "Green" altogether, to
OA Journals, threw in a dizzying bunch of other color-coded distinctions
irrelevant to OA, and threw out the most fundamental distinction of all,
pertaining to self-archiving! And revived the bogus "*OA/FA" distinction
to boot.

Quick reminder: What distinguishes this notional "*OA" from OA (= FA)
is the following:

(1) Creative Commons License (irrelevant if the full-text is accessible
toll-free to all users, webwide, immediately and permanently).

(2) Republication/Re-Use Rights (irrelevant if the full-text is accessible
toll-free to all users, webwide, immediately and permanently). (OA
is about user access -- which includes reading online, downloading,
data-crunching, and print-off, and de facto also trawler-harvesting; it is
not about 

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

Prior AmSci Topic Thread begins:
"Free Access vs. Open Access" (August, 2003)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2956.html

In "The Spectrum of E-Journal Access Policies: Open to Restricted Access"

http://www.escholarlypub.com/digitalkoans/2005/05/13/the-spectrum-of-e-journal-access-policies-open-to-restricted-access/

Charles Bailey proposes a rather abundant new spectrum of color codes
to add to the ones we have already (Gold: OA Journal; Green: Gives Green
Light to Author Self-Archiving; Gray: Neither Gold nor Green). Charles
proposes reassigning "Green" to "Gold" and adding "Cyan," Yellow,"
"Orange" and "Red" (hinting there might be more!).

A Plea For Chrononomic Parsimony and a Focus on What Really Matters

Stevan Harnad

Ah me! There's no legislating color tastes or color codes, but could I put
in a plea on behalf of the original purpose of doing the color-coding in
the first place? It definitely was not in order to assign a hue to every
conceivable variant of either (i) journal copyright policy or (ii)
journal economic policy. There aren't enough colors under the sun to
tag every possible variant of either of those two, and *who cares*!
http://www.iumj.indiana.edu/Librarians/colorcoding.html

What we care about, presumably, is making sure that all would-be users
have immediate, permanent, webwide online access to all research journal
articles, rather than just those for which their institutions can afford
to pay the access-tolls: I take it that that is what all the fuss about
journal prices and IP is about. It is not an exercise in l'art
pour l'art.

So the only two pertinent distinctions insofar as immediate, permanent, webwide
online access to research journal articles is concerned are these:

"The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3147.html

(1) Does the *journal* make the full-texts of all of its articles
immediately and permanently accessible to all would-be users webwide
toll-free? If it does, the journal is an "Open Access Journal." Color
it GOLD. Never mind what its cost-recovery model is: It could have
many. Never mind what its copyright policy is: It doesn't matter, because
the purpose of the "open access" movement was to get immediate, permanent,
toll-free, full-text, webwide online access, and Gold journals provide
it. End of story. Nothing about republication rights, paper distribution
rights, etc. etc. That is all completely irrelevant.
http://www.doaj.org/

Second distinction. No need even to ask about it if the journal is Gold, as you
already have what you wanted. But what if the journal is not Gold? (Reminder: 
That
means it does *not* provide immediate, permanent, toll-free, full-text online
access to all of its articles webwide.)

(2) Does the journal give its authors the green light to self-archive
their own articles so as to provide immediate, permanent, toll-free,
full-text online webwide access to each of their own articles? If it does,
color the journal GREEN. (Green comes in two shades, because articles have
two embryological stages: pre- and post-peer-review. Color the journal
Pale-Green if it only gives its green light to the self-archiving of
pre-peer-review preprints and full Green if it gives its green light to
the self-archiving of the post-peer-review postprint.)
http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php

Lemma (trivial): All Gold journals are, a fortiori, also Green. (*Please*
let's not waste time talking about it!)

Other utter irrelevancies to avoid (and, a fortiori, to avoid assigning
a color code to, since the colors are meant to draw attention to what
is relevant, and not to immortalize every distinction anyone could
conceivably become fascinated by:

(a) It is irrelevant (to the open access movement) what the copyright
transfer agreement or license is *if the publisher is Green.* Let us not start
eulogizing Creative Commons Licenses in all their variants. They are lovely,
highly commendable, but *irrelevant* if the publisher is Green (insofar as open
access is concerned, which is, for those of you who may already have forgotten:
immediate, permanent, webwide access to the full-text of the journal
article, toll-free, online).

"Making Ends Meet in the Creative Commons"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3797.html

(b) It is irrelevant (to the open access movement) what the publisher says about
the website where the author may self-archive his own article: it doesn't matter
if it's called "home page," "personal website," "institutional server,"
"institutional repository," "institutional archive," or what have you. And on no
account assign -- to all those arbitrary distinctions in how your employer 
elects
to label y

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

This scriptural exegesis about "free" vs. "open" calls to mind
the (alleged) words of a certain franco-austrian monarchess on the
subject of brioche:

"Let Them Eat Cake..." (M. Antoinette)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1525.html

What research needs is toll-free access to all refereed research,
immediately, to stanch its mounting impact-loss.

It doesn't have it. Why on earth are we bickering about "open" vs. "free"
instead of doing everything we can to hasten the stanching of that
impact-loss, now?

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0025.gif

The BOAI definition of "open access" is not Holy Writ. We wrote it!
We keep quoting back the same passages at one another, but we differ
in our interpretation of them. I have already answered this point of
Mike's several times over, but, for the sake of OA, I'm willing to say
it yet again:

Michael Eisen wrote:

>s> On Thu, 8 Jan 2004, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>s>
>s> There is nothing in the BOAI definition to support the "free/open"
>s> distinction that some have since attempted to make. In particular, the
>s> BOAI definition states that author/institution self-archiving of the
>s> full-text of an article is one of the two ways to make that article open
>s> access (BOAI-1 ["green"]  and BOAI-2 ["gold"]). Proponents of
>s> the free/open distinction have attempted to argue that BOAI-2 is
>s> "open access" while BOAI-1 is merely "free access" (unless the author
>s> negotiates something equivalent to the creative commons license, including
>s> republication rights, as in some BOAI-2 journals).
>s>
>s> I have argued that this is not only *not* part of the BOAI definition,
>s> but that it is unnecessary and would be a gratuitous deterrent if
>s> taken to be a necessary condition for open access.
>
> I really don't want to beat this to death, and I think you and I are just
> going to have to agree to disagree about the importance of redistribution
> and reuse rights. However, I don't see how you can keep saying that the BOAI
> doesn't support the distinction between free and open. The BOAI text can
> speak for itself.
>
>   "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."
>   [ http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess ]

As I have said repeatedly, every single capability listed in the
first sentence above is provided by authors self-archiving their own
full-texts on the web. Every single one.

In the case of articles made OA through author self-archiving, the "other
lawful purposes" simply does not include republishing by a third-party
publisher, either on paper or online. That's all.

Open access was always about open access, not about 3rd party republishing
rights. (Moreover, with the article available to one and all --
for reading, downloading, copying, distributing *the URL* to others
(so they can do likewise), printing, searching, linking, crawling,
indexing, passing to software or any other lawful purposes -- it is
not at all clear why any 3rd part publisher would want to republish and
redistribute them!)

The second sentence of the BOAI definition is vague, and it is not clear
what the "should" means.

Of course authorship and text integrity need to be protected. They
are protected either way: whether the OA is provided by (1) publishing
the text in an OA journal under a creative-commons license or by (2)
publishing the text in an OA journal under ordinary copyright transfer,
but the OA journal (being OA) contracts to make the full-text OA
from its own website (as so many of the OA journals listed in DOAJ
http://www.doaj.org/ do, and to retain republishing rights  -- or is
Mike suggesting that they not be counted as OA journals either, if they
do not adopt the Creative Commons License?) or by (3) self-archiving
the full-text on the author's own institutional website.

As to the force of the "should" regarding republishing rights: it is
vague, and if construed as "must," it is either in contradiction with the
"any other lawful purpose" clause of the first sentence *or* it excludes
all self-archived full-texts a priori if they do not renegotiate rights
with their publisher: This would be to redefine BOAI-1: "Self-archiving
one's own full text, free for all uses on the web, is *not* OA!"

I assure you that if that far

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Michael Eisen]

>
> On Thu, 8 Jan 2004, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>
> There is nothing in the BOAI definition to support the "free/open"
> distinction that some have since attempted to make. In particular, the
> BOAI definition states that author/institution self-archiving of the
> full-text of an article is one of the two ways to make that article open
> access (BOAI-1 ["green"]  and BOAI-2 ["gold"]). Proponents of
> the free/open distinction have attempted to argue that BOAI-2 is
> "open access" while BOAI-1 is merely "free access" (unless the author
> negotiates something equivalent to the creative commons license, including
> republication rights, as in some BOAI-2 journals).
>
> I have argued that this is not only *not* part of the BOAI definition,
> but that it is unnecessary and would be a gratuitous deterrent if
> taken to be a necessary condition for open access.
>

I really don't want to beat this to death, and I think you and I are just
going to have to agree to disagree about the importance of redistribution
and reuse rights. However, I don't see how you can keep saying that the BOAI
doesn't support the distinction between free and open. The BOAI text can
speak for itself.

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."

I have been arguing that self-archiving where the original publisher
restricts uses of the self-archived version of the paper falls outside the
BOAI definition of open access. While I disagree strongly with you on this,
I accept that you think there are tactical reasons to promote such
restricted self-archiving.  But I simply can not see how you can claim that
making papers freely available in a way that explicitly prevents copying,
distribution and many other uses is consistent with the BOAI definition of
open access.

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Jim Till]

On Thu, 8 Jan 2004, Stevan Harnad wrote [in part]:

>[sh]> If you have the money to publish *one* article in
>[sh]> PLoS ($1500) you have more than enough money to set
>[sh]> up at least one eprint archive. (Kepler OAI
>[sh]> "archivelets" might be an even cheaper solution:
>[sh]> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april01/maly/04maly.html ).

I did set up, in June 2001, the original version of a Kepler
archivelet. However, the original Kepler Search Service,
where my eprints were cached, is no longer supported by the
research group at Old Dominion University. So, the stability
of the server that supported the archivelet did become an
issue.

FYI, the current home page for Kepler is at:
http://kepler.cs.odu.edu:8080/kepler/index.html

At the bottom of this page is a link labeled:
"What happened to the previous version of Kepler?",
http://kepler.cs.odu.edu:8080/kepler/previous-kepler.html

If one follows this link, the page obtained includes this
paragraph:

"The first version of Kepler as described in D-Lib Magazine
7(4) is no longer functioning. Users of old Kepler are urged
to upgrade to the new archivelet. The publications that were
previously uploaded via old Kepler are available in the test
group section."

There's a link to the "test group", but clicking on it has
yielded, on several occasions, only a 404 (not available)
error message.

So, my experiment with the first version of Kepler was an
interesting one, but I've decided not to repeat it with a
"new archivelet". One experience with instability of the
host server was enough for me.

In my previous message, I also asked for advice about
self-archiving a current eprint of mine (it's *not* about
electronic publishing, it's an invited commentary about
cancer-related electronic support groups). It's currently in
preprint form, and I'd prefer not to self-archive it until
it's in postprint form.  As I mentioned in my previous
message, I'm retaining copyright, and the right to
self-archive the postprint version (if it's accepted for
publication, after peer-review by the toll-access journal to
which it's been submitted). But, where to self-archive the
postprint?

As I mentioned previously, my university has a "community"-
based eprint repository, but I'm not a member of any of the
current "communities". (BTW, the new Kepler archivelets are
also, I believe, "community"-based).

My eprint also isn't suitable for the Quantitative Biology
section of the arXiv repository. What about CogPrints?

Stevan responded:

>[sh]> Does it not look compatible with any of the following
>[sh]> existing CogPrints subject categories?
>[sh]> http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/view/subjects/
>[sh]>
>[sh]> * Electronic Publishing
>[sh]>   o Archives (34)
>[sh]>   o Copyright (12)
>[sh]>   o Economics (21)
>[sh]>   o Peer Review (16)

No, it doesn't. However, it does contain a section about
Internet research ethics (in the context of research
involving cancer-related electronic support groups).

So, maybe it might not be entirely ridiculous to include it
in this CogPrints subject category:

* Philosophy
   o Ethics (18)

Jim Till
University of Toronto

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

On Thu, 8 Jan 2004, Jim Till wrote:

> The debate seems to me to be mainly about the 2nd component of the
> definitions of open access that are included in the Berlin Declaration,
> and in the Bethesda Statement

No, the discussion is about the BOAI definition, the one that coined the
term "open access" and defined it. The rest are derivative documents,
not defining ones.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess

There is nothing in the BOAI definition to support the "free/open"
distinction that some have since attempted to make. In particular, the
BOAI definition states that author/institution self-archiving of the
full-text of an article is one of the two ways to make that article open
access (BOAI-1 ["green"]  and BOAI-2 ["gold"]). Proponents of
the free/open distinction have attempted to argue that BOAI-2 is
"open access" while BOAI-1 is merely "free access" (unless the author
negotiates something equivalent to the creative commons license, including
republication rights, as in some BOAI-2 journals).

I have argued that this is not only *not* part of the BOAI definition,
but that it is unnecessary and would be a gratuitous deterrent if
taken to be a necessary condition for open access.

> in the Wellcome Trust position
> statement, http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/1/awtvispolpub.html
>
> "2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental
> materials, including a copy of the permission as stated
> above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited
> immediately upon initial publication in at least one online
> repository that is supported by an academic institution,
> scholarly society, government agency, or other
> well-established organization that seeks to enable open
> access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and
> long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed
> Central is such a repository)."

This is not in the BOAI either, and it conflates open access itself
with archiving.

It is certainly part of the definition of "open-access journal-publishing"
(BOAI-2) that the journal must provide open access! This necessarily
entails some form of "archiving" -- if by "archiving" we mean providing
some place where the user can have open access to the content of the
journal.

So it is tautological to say that the full-text of every OA journal
article must be deposited in "at least one" archive! That is BOAI-2. It
remains only to add that it is the *journal* (not the author) who must
deposit it (in the case of BOAI-2) and that it is highly desirable
(though not mandatory) that the archive should be OAI-compliant.
And the "permission" consists of the rights agreement with the OA publisher.

That's all implicit in the definition of BOAI-2 (the golden road to
OA). But what about BOAI-1 (the green road to OA)? Here too, the full-text
is deposited in an open-access eprint archive (preferably OAI-compliant),
but this time it is deposited by the author, not the publisher. And the
publisher is likely to be a toll-access publisher. And there has been
(and need be) no further rights agreement (other than the one with the
toll-access publisher. Nor does the agreement need to be deposited. The
only thing that needs to be deposited is the full-text of the article itself
(though a link to the publisher's toll-access version is a useful
courtesy, and a good scholarly practise too)!

Archiving, in other-words, is not merely the access-provision component
of BOAI-2 journals. It is also an independent way of providing open
access to toll-access journal articles. Not "free access": "open access."

> An example of what is (or is not) a "suitable standard
> electronic format" isn't provided in this version of the 2nd
> component of the definition. (I assume that "suitable
> formats" would include XML, PDF & HTML? Plus some other
> formats?).

The electronic format is not and should not be part of the definition
of open-access: Any user must be able to download the full-text,
toll-free. That's all. XML is more desirable than HTML is more
desirable than PDF is more desirable than PS or ASCII. TeX is nice
too. OAI-interoperable is preferable to not. But none of those are
definitional.

> The only example of a suitable "online repository" that's
> provided is PubMed Central. It seems clear to me that the
> kind of stable-institution-based archive that Stevan Harnad
> has been advocating so vigorously would also fit this
> definition.

I should hope so. The only archive-type differences are: OAI (more
preferable) vs. non-OAI (less preferable). Central discipline-based archives
and distributed institutional archives are also equivalent (especially if
OAI-compliant). But for BOAI-1 (self-archiving), distributed institutional
archives may be a better bet because institutions are in a position to
mandate and monitor compliance with an extension of their "publish or
perish" policies to "provide open access for your publications" whereas
central and disciplinary archives are not: Authors an

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Jim Till]

In a message sent to this Forum on 3 Jan 2004, I asked:

> Has anyone who has contributed to this thread proposed a
> revised definition of open access? Or, is the debate
> mainly about how best to implement the BOAI definition? See:
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess

I'll try to answer my own question. The debate seems to me
to be mainly about the 2nd component of the definitions of
open access that are included in the Berlin Declaration,
http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html
and in the Bethesda Statement,
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm

I'll quote the 2nd component of the definition that's
included in the Bethesda Statement, mainly because the same
definition is also included in the Wellcome Trust position
statement, http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/1/awtvispolpub.html

"2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental
materials, including a copy of the permission as stated
above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited
immediately upon initial publication in at least one online
repository that is supported by an academic institution,
scholarly society, government agency, or other
well-established organization that seeks to enable open
access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and
long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed
Central is such a repository)."

An example of what is (or is not) a "suitable standard
electronic format" isn't provided in this version of the 2nd
component of the definition. (I assume that "suitable
formats" would include XML, PDF & HTML? Plus some other
formats?).

The only example of a suitable "online repository" that's
provided is PubMed Central. It seems clear to me that the
kind of stable-institution-based archive that Stevan Harnad
has been advocating so vigorously would also fit this
definition.

So, the debate about definitions of open access may be, in
essence, a debate that's primarily about the stability and
interoperability of any particular "online repository", and,
secondarily, about what's a "suitable standard electronic
format"? There seems to me to be little debate about the 1st
component of the definition of open access (which is the
only component of the BOAI definition).

The key issues then remain: how best to persuade authors
either to publish in open-access journals, or to seek (or
retain) the right to self-archive a version in a suitable
institutional or disciplinary online repository (if one is
available to them).

What have I misunderstood, or missed?

In my own case, publication in a suitable open-access
journal is more feasible for me, as an author, because I can
pay any necessary article-processing fees (APFs) from the
(modest!) funds available for the support of my research and
scholarship, and because no suitable institutional online
repository is currently available to me.

There's such a repository ("T-Space", based on D-Space
software) at my university (Toronto):
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/index.jsp

However, only members of particular "communities" within the
university may self-archive eprints there, and, at present,
I'm not a member of any of these particular "communities".
So, I'm left with the alternatives of publishing in "gold"
open-access journals, and/or advocating for the
establishment of an appropriate online repository that I
could use for self-archiving of eprints that have been
published in "green" journals.

I don't need to wait to use the former route. I do need to
wait in order to use the latter one. So (contrary to the
norm!), I'm a author who wants to self-archive in an online
repository, but currently can't. An exception is one
commentary of mine, entitled "Predecessors of preprint
servers", published originally in Learned Publishing
2001(Jan); 14(1): 7-13 and subsequently self-archived, in
HTML, in the Physics section of the arXiv repository,
http://arxiv.org/html/physics/0102004

I've recently prepared an eprint that's an invited
commentary (about electronic support groups). It's just been
submitted, for peer-review, to a toll-access journal. If
it's accepted, I'd like to self-archive it in some
appropriate non-profit online repository (I have already
obtained permission to do so, and also have retained
copyright). This particular commentary isn't suitable for
submission to the Quantitative Biology section of the arXiv
repository, nor to Cogprints.  Constructive advice would be
welcomed.

Jim Till
University of Toronto

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Peter Suber]

At 02:13 PM 1/3/2004 +, Jan Velterop wrote:

>Peter,
>
>You're absolutely correct in your observation that our differences are
>minute, in the scheme of things. Nonetheless, I think I disagree with you
>that we have Open Access if just the price barrier is lifted.

Jan,
  You have this part of my position reversed.  On this point I was
agreeing with you that open access goes beyond lifting price barriers to
lifting permission barriers.  For a fuller exposition of why I think
removing both kinds of access barrier is important, see
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/acrl.htm

  Best,
  Peter

--
Peter Suber
Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College
Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge
Author, SPARC Open Access Newsletter
Editor, Open Access News blog
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/
peter.su...@earlham.edu

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

The quintessence of the disagreement between (on one side) Mike Eisen
(PLoS) and Jan Velterop (BMC) and (on the other side) myself (and Peter
Suber, Barbara Kirsop, and Sally Morris) is contained at the end of the
very last sentence of Mike's latest posting:

On Sat, 3 Jan 2004, Michael Eisen wrote:

> things like conversion to XML and the right to make articles available
> in different forms at different places - are practical prerequisites
> for the success of open access.

I hope it is evident to any reader who has not lost sight of the true
current state of the peer-reviewed journal literature today that the
*only* prerequisite worth talking about today -- the big one, the one
we are nowhere near having met -- is toll-free access to the 2.5 million
yearly articles in the 24,000 peer-reviewed journals.

This fact is fundamental to understanding practical reality here! To keep
focussing instead exclusively, or even primarily, on the (undeniable,
welcome and admirable) success of the new fleet of BMC and PLoS journals
is to lose track of the actual numbers involved, as well as of time:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0048.gif
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0025.gif

The open access being provided today by publishing in those
1000 open-access journals amounts to <5% of the 2.5 million
articles published every year in the total 24,000 journals. The
articles in those 1000 open-access journals are not the only articles
that are openly accessible, however. About three times as many articles
annually are open-access because their authors have self-archived them:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0049.gif

But even with the help of that second road to oepn access,
annual open access today is still under 20%. And although
open-access provision through self-archiving is growing faster
than through open-access publishing, and *could* reach 100%
virtually overnight, even *that* is still growing far, far too slowly!
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0023.gif
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0043.gif

There are two (complementary) ways to provide more open access: (1)
by creating or converting 23,000 more open-access journals, finding
funds to cover the author-costs of publishing in them, and persuading
the authors of the remaining articles (80%) to publish them in those
open-access journals instead of in the toll-access journals they
publish them in now; or (2) by persuading the authors of the remaining
articles (80%) to self-archive them in their institutional open-access
archive (creating the archives is trivial, and can be done overnight):
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0026.gif

*That's* the prerequisite to be met. Without it, all we have is a small
and arbitrary subset of the journal literature. Meeting the prerequisite
is a matter of persuading authors and their institutions and funders
that providing open access, now, is in their own best interests and
within their reach.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0006.gif

Fifty-five percent of journals already support author self-archiving, and
many of the rest will agree if asked.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0021.gif

So the delay in meeting the prerequisite resides not with journal
publishers but with authors, their institutions and funders.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0028.gif

What have XML or republication rights to do with any of this? Absolutely
nothing! They are just ways to while away our time while *not* meeting
the prerequisites.

> I think an important point has been lost in the various threads on this
> topic.
>
> 1) universal free access to the peer-reviewed literature, in any form, would
> be a wonderful thing - both in its own right, and because it would almost
> certainly lead to universal open access

Then why is PLoS with its considerable resources promoting only
open-access publishing (BOAI-2), instead of also promoting, *at least*
as vigorously, the other road that "would almost certainly lead to
universal open access"? (BOAI-1: self-archiving.) For the same money,
and in the same breath, the dual unified open-access strategy could be
promoted, instead of just open-access publishing:

Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
journal whenever one exists.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/

There's a lot more room for immediate growth via the green road than
the golden road right now. And both lead to the same destination. Why
are time (and advertisement space and 

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Michael Eisen]

I think an important point has been lost in the various threads on this
topic.

While there is clearly disagreement about what does and should constitute
open access, I think we all agree on two things:

1) universal free access to the peer-reviewed literature, in any form, would
be a wonderful thing - both in its own right, and because it would almost
certainly lead to universal open access

2) the greatest challenge facing open access advocates is convincing authors
to make their works available freely and/or openly by either publishing in
open access journals or by self-archiving

One of the reasons that I and many others are so ardent in our defense of
the stronger form of open access - one that explicitly permits
redistribution and reuse - is because we believe that the uses these
freedoms will enable are a critical part of making open access more
attractive to authors.

A simple example is PubMed. Virtually all scientists who work in fields
whose journals are included in PubMed use this database as their primary
tool for searching the literature, and this is unlikely to change. PubMed is
free, simple, efficient and fairly comprehensive, and, with links to
journals on publisher websites it provides a gateway to the online
scientific literature. Of course, most of the articles are behind toll
barriers, and these barriers are not transparent even to scientists at the
wealthiest institutions. An exception are the articles in PubMed Central -
these are freely available to anyone, with a prominent link provided in
PubMed. Because scientists in their role as readers experience the utility
of PMC on a daily basis, they recognize the advantages of journals that
deposit their content in PMC when they choose the journals in which they
publish, and PLoS has received considerable feedback from authors who cite
immediate availability in PMC as a major reason for their choosing to
publish with us (I'm sure BMC has had a similar experience). Recently, the
NCBI has begun linking their sequence, structure, taxonomy and other
databases to the full-text articles in PMC, thereby increasing their utility
and their impact. As people start to use these tools, the attractiveness of
journals in PMC - especially those that make their content available
immediately - will grow.

The benefits of inclusion in PMC - and in other services that will begin
taking advantage of the content published by BMC, PLoS and others open
access publishers or made truly open access through other means - are denied
to articles that are self-archived in a way that precludes their reuse and
redistribution.

While it is may be theoretically possible to do some of these things by
crawling self-archived content, it is a practical reality that relying
solely on such methods will diminish the attractiveness of open access, and
is a major reason why I believe that the things that Stevan dismisses as
"frills" or as organic food for the starving - things like conversion to XML
and the right to make articles available in different forms at different
places - are practical prerequisites for the success of open access.

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Jan Velterop]

 Dear Barbara,

Clearly, what you say makes sense, but we *must* ensure that the material
can be found and doesn't get lost. That's what requirements like
OAI-compliance and archives do. If there are other ways to achieve that;
fine, of course. But if it's 'free' but unfindable, what have we gained?
It's not the only difference between 'free' and 'open' access, of course,
but an important part of it for the developing world, I would have thought.

That said, I believe that self-archiving on a massive scale, even if only
'free', will lead to 'open' access in the end.

Best wishes for 2004,

Jan Velterop

-Original Message-
From: Barbara Kirsop
To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org
Sent: 1/2/04 5:37 PM
Subject: Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

Dear All,

I have sympathised with Stevan's New Year message on the
misunderstandings and digressions regarding acceptance of OA (see
american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org). We faced all these
uncertainties at the Bangalore workshop last year and developed a FAQ
similar to Stevan's for the EPT web site (www.epublishingtrust.org). The
present discussions on the AmSci forum on whether 'open' is the same
as/different from 'free' access and comparing this with the need to feed
the starving now or wait a bit til everyone can have 'organic' food is
spot on. I reflect that these discussions, erudite and entertaining as
they are, are of little interest to science in the developing world.
Scientists (and patients with malaria) in the developing world need the
information now, asap, in any format that can best be provided, don't
wait til everything is perfect, just do it. And science in the developed
world equally needs the highly relevant research from the developing
regions now - though it mostly doesn't recognise this knowledge gap.

So I was pleased to read the message from Dr. T.B. Rajashekar of the IIS
that he and his colleagues plan to promote and inform the scientists
in India about their institutional archive (eprints.iisc.ernet.in) in
the coming months. Great. Perhaps the most important message that is
least understood by scientists is that they can 'do it now' and still
continue to publish in their favoured journals, in parallel. We are all
naturally hesitant to give up the system we know and love and trust, so
people should understand that there is no need to. Just do it now and
the
world will not collapse around them, they will not be criticised by
their
colleagues, but infinitely more fellow scientists will be aware of their
research, their organisations will be promoted and they will themselves
have contributed to the global knowledge pool, currently only
half-filled.

So good luck to Raja, to Arun's indefatigable efforts and to the
excellent Bioline (www.bioline.org.br) for helping the developing
country publishers understand OA and providing a place for them to do it
(eprints.utsc.utoronto.ca). Maybe we would be right, as Arun suggests,
to
focus on India, China and Brazil first, and maybe the 2004 e-publishing
workshop in Brasilia could be a start, and could be cloned for other
regions?

Barbara

Stevan Harnad wrote:

 > On Fri, 2 Jan 2004, Subbiah Arunachalam wrote:
 >
 >>Please visit  < http://paniit.iitd.ac.in/indest/extended/
 >><http://paniit.iitd.ac.in/indest/extended/> > and look up the
presentations
 >>and recommendations made at the INDEST meeting held in October.
INDEST is a
 >>consortium of libraries of select higher education institutions in
India.
 >>
 >>Their emphasis on theses is surprising. The substance of every thesis
 >>appears in research papers published in journals. Besides, many
theses from
 >>Indian universities are of dubious value, although IISc and IITs are
a lot
 >>different from the run-of-the-mill Indian university.
 >
 > Dear Arun,
 >
 > As time goes by, the OA initiative begins to look like a microcosm of
 > all human history and human folly. I don't know that I have learned
as
 > much about life from anything else.
 >
 > The answer to your question of why it is that this INDEST meeting
 > seems to grasp so little is that it is very much like other such
 > meetings worldwide, for at least a decade now. Although there is
nothing
 > conceptually deep or even practically revolutionary about any of
this,
 > it has become obvious that it is prone to a seemingly endless series
of
 > systematic misunderstandings and digressions, never quite able to get
to
 > (or grasp, or stick to, or act upon) the point.
 >
 > The reasons are both local and global. At this particular INDEST
meeting,
 > one obvious reason is that it is again primarily a meeting of the
library
 > community, which is well-meaning and (because of the pressure of the
 &g

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Jim Till]

On Fri, 2 Jan 2004, Barbara Kirsop wrote [in part, on the
Subject: Re: Free Access vs. Open Access]:

>[bk]> The present discussions on the AmSci forum on whether
>[bk]> 'open' is the same as/different from 'free' access and
>[bk]> comparing this with the need to feed the starving now
>[bk]> or wait a bit til everyone can have 'organic' food is
>[bk]> spot on. I reflect that these discussions, erudite and
>[bk]> entertaining as they are, are of little interest to
>[bk]> science in the developing world. Scientists (and
>[bk]> patients with malaria) in the developing world need
>[bk]> the information now, asap, in any format that can best
>[bk]> be provided, don't wait til everything is perfect, just
>[bk]> do it. And science in the developed world equally needs
>[bk]> the highly relevant research from the developing
>[bk]> regions now - though it mostly doesn't recognise this
>[bk]> knowledge gap.

Thanks for this eloquent summary of the "global health argument"
in favour of open access.

I must confess that I've not read every word of every message
in the interesting thread on 'open' vs. 'free' access. Has
anyone who has contributed to this thread proposed a revised
definition of open access? Or, is the debate mainly about how
best to implement the BOAI definition? See:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess

"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."

If anyone is proposing a revised definition, then what
is it?

Jim Till
University of Toronto

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Jan Velterop]

Peter,

You're absolutely correct in your observation that our differences are
minute, in the scheme of things. Nonetheless, I think I disagree with
you that we have Open Access if just the price barrier is lifted. I
don't think it's a question of archiving and OAI-compliance (or other
sure-fire findability-tools) making OA more useful, but these things
making OA useful and worth having at all. To take your medicine analogy:
the drug may be safe and effective, but it's useless if  the patient
can't even find it, let alone obtain it (even if it is free).

Anyway, I do accept that there is perhaps more than one way to ensure
permanent findability and that 'OAI-compliance' and 'archiving'
may need to be made more generic in a definition. As my colleague
Matt Cockerill pointed out (though not on this list), "the point is
that *some* programmatic means to allow article data to flow between
different sites is needed. If the structured content is trapped in the
context of a specific website and cannot be reliably programmatically
extracted and worked with, then one of they key potential benefits of
open access is lost."

He is right here. The *benefits* of Open Access are the issues the
definition should follow. Otherwise Open Access is something for its
own sake, like l'art pour l'art.

Best,

Jan

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

On Sat, 3 Jan 2004, Lars Aronsson wrote:

> [H]ow do we determine if an article is "permanently" accessible?...
> I know but one way to guarantee permanent access, and that is to allow
> free copying and republishing.

Webwide toll-free copying, downloading, and storing of self-archived articles
is allowed.

Webwide harvesting and caching is unpreventable.

Republishing is unnecessary.

Negotiating republishing rights is hence a needless obstacle and deterrent.

Permanence is always just a matter of probability.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#1.Preservation

The primary preservation burden for the self-archived versions of toll-access
journal articles is on the primary toll-access version.

The full preservation burden is taken over only if and when the toll-access
journal converts to open-access.

The self-archived versions of physics articles from 1991, and their
respective enhanced impacts, are still alive and well today.

The versions non-archived out of perennity-qualms or failure to negotiate
republication rights -- and their respective enhanced impacts -- never
came to be.

Stevan Harnad

NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004)
is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
To join the Forum:

http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
Post discussion to:
american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org
Hypermail Archive:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html

Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
journal whenever one exists.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Lars Aronsson]

Stevan Harnad wrote:
> So here is my list, again:
>
> (1) UBIQUITOUS DIRECT ONLINE ACCESS MAKES DERIVATIVE ACCESS SUPERFLUOUS:
> Once the full-text is immediately, permanently, and ubiquitously
> (i.e., webwide) accessible toll-free, so any user anywhere, any time,
> can read the full-text on-screen, download it, store it, print it off,
> search/grep it, computationally process it, etc. -- which any user can
> do if the author self-archives it -- the further rights and uses that
> distinguish "free" from "open" become either moot or supererogatory:

Perhaps I'm missing some other definition here, but how do we
determine if an article is "permanently" accessible?  If an article is
published in, say, D-Lib Magazine, does that mean it is permanently
accessible?  How does this happen?  How can we know that what is there
today will be there twenty or fifty years from now?  The entire web is
younger than that.

I know but one way to guarantee permanent access, and that is to allow
free copying and republishing.  How can this derivative kind of access
suddenly become superfluous?  What other ways are there?

Of course I think that the people behind D-Lib Magazine are very
careful with their backups and long-term commitment, but the same
might not be the case with every self-archiving institution out there.
Nations can fall and institutions can be forced to change their
policies.


--
  Lars Aronsson (l...@aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Peter Suber]

Jan,

Thanks for your comment.

I've already argued in public that deposit should not be part of the
definition of OA,
, and there's
no need to repeat the arguments here.  The same arguments apply to
OAI-compliance.

The point is a delicate one, since I strongly support both deposit and
OAI-compliance.  I just think there's a difference between the definition
of OA and steps we can take to make OA literature more useful, just as
there's a difference between the definition of (say) voting and steps we
can take to make the right to vote easier to exercise and harder to take
away.

I accept your argument that interoperability makes archived literature more
useful.  But that doesn't make it part of the definition of OA.  If it did,
then everything that makes archived literature more useful would be part of
OA --including peer review and punctuation.  There is more than one good
thing, and luckily all the ones we're talking about are
compatible.  Literature should be OA *and* interoperable *and* preserved
*and* peer-reviewed  Drug companies say that a certain medicine is safe
and effective without feeling any pressure to redefine effectiveness as
part of the concept of safety.

To me, open access is a kind of access, not a kind of interoperability or a
kind of preservation.  When literature is openly accessible, it's much more
useful than the same literature behind price and permission barriers.  But
there's still a lot that we can do to make it even more useful.  For
example, we can make it interoperable and we can preserve it.  I want us to
do all of these things.  I just want us to be clear about what we're
doing.  When we do them, we're not providing OA; we're enhancing literature
that is already OA.

An archive might be open access without being OAI-compliant.  That was the
case with PubMed Central until this fall.  When it became OAI-compliant, it
did not become open-access; it was already open-access.  It became
interoperable with other OAI-compliant archives, and more useful.

BTW, I agree with you that the Bethesda and Berlin statements err by
limiting the number of copies of an OA work that the author could make for
personal use.  If the work is OA, there should be no limit.  I applaud BMC
for deleting this restriction from its own definition.  I think the two
statements also err by making deposit part of the definition of OA, though
they do not err by encouraging deposit.

Finally, I want to emphasize how minor our differences are.  We do not
differ on what ought to be done.  Thank goodness.  We differ only on how to
define a term.  On this, if we can't persuade one another, at least we can
agree to disagree.

 Happy new year,
 Peter

(PS.  I'm about to leave town for two days, without connectivity.  If this
conversation continues, I'll catch up when I return.)


At 09:00 PM 1/2/2004 +, you wrote:


Peter,

I beg to differ. Maybe to the letter these things are not  'conditios
sine qua non' for Open Access, but they pretty much are 'conditios sine
qua useless'. The exception is perhaps the copyright provision, as any
copyrightholder can assign the article to Open Access; it doesn't have
to be the author. But the other points are important, and in my view
part and parcel of Open Access, indeed of its whole 'reason d'etre',
and not just 'supportive practices'.

What is Open Access worth if an article is 'open' but not easily
universally accessible? For that we need OAI-compliance.

What is Open Access if not in a public archive, outside the reach of
whatever residual power of the publisher and the chance to get lost? Don't
underestimate the risks here.

What is Open Access if not with the right to complete re-use, even
'commercial'? Let's not forget that 'commercial' doesn't always entail
immense profits. It also covers the local printer who takes an Open Access
article, prints it, brings it to places that the Web doesn't (yet) reach,
and makes a modest profit in the process. If that should be proscribed,
access isn't truly open.

This last issue, by the way, exposes a flaw in the Bethesda, Wellcome and
Berlin declarations. They still speak of allowing 'a limited number of
print copies for personal use'. We, at BioMed Central, don't agree, and we
therefore impose no restrictions whatsoever on the number of print copies.
Relinquishing them would threaten income in the old model, but not anymore
in the Open Access model, so what's the point of restrictions anyway?

I can't escape the thought that the discussion questioning the need to
have these conditions/rights in the definition of Open Access betrays a
less than full transition in thinking from the '(copy)rights-mongering'
model of publishing to the 'service' model. After the publisher has
been paid for the service of having the material properly peer-reviewed,
made 'web-ready' and embedded in the literature via reference-linking,
OAI-compliance, inclusion in secondary service

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

On Fri, 2 Jan 2004, Jan Velterop wrote:

> What is Open Access worth if an article is 'open' but not easily
> universally accessible? For that we need OAI-compliance.

What is it worth without OAI? Infinitely more than if access is blocked
by tolls (as most of it still is today).

(But of course OAI-compliance is highly desirable -- and easy to
provide too.)

> What is Open Access if not in a public archive, outside the reach of
> whatever residual power of the publisher and the chance to get lost? Don't
> underestimate the risks here.

Open Access is immediate, permanent, toll-free, online, webwide access to the
full-text of a journal article (readable, downloadable, storable, printable,
computer-processable) for anyone with access to the web, any time, anywhere.

(And the articles self-archived centrally, for example, in the physics
arxiv since 1991, are still alive and well and with us today; so too
are, for example, my own articles, self-archived institutionally since
the 1980's. You would prefer not to call any of this "open access"
provision!)

> What is Open Access if not with the right to complete re-use, even
> 'commercial'? Let's not forget that 'commercial' doesn't always entail
> immense profits. It also covers the local printer who takes an Open Access
> article, prints it, brings it to places that the Web doesn't (yet) reach,
> and makes a modest profit in the process. If that should be proscribed,
> access isn't truly open.

Printing off is too trivial to argue about. (Email the URLs to multiple
users and let them print it out for themselves!) And the BOAI definition of
open access -- although I think it is next to absurd to be citing
chapter-and-verse in all this! -- states:

"free availability on the public internet... without financial,
legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from
gaining access to the internet itself"
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess

Republication rights are another matter, and are not among the necessary
conditions for open access. (They are added values: desirable, but not
necessary. And certainly nothing to hold back access to wait for --
or to withhold the OA title from!)

> This last issue, by the way, exposes a flaw in the Bethesda, Wellcome and
> Berlin declarations. They still speak of allowing 'a limited number of
> print copies for personal use'. We, at BioMed Central, don't agree, and we
> therefore impose no restrictions whatsoever on the number of print copies.
> Relinquishing them would threaten income in the old model, but not anymore
> in the Open Access model, so what's the point of restrictions anyway?

It is very helpful that BMC provides this extra right and added value,
but if a toll-access journal relinquishes that right to any and every
other publisher it undermines all hope of cost-recovery -- unless it
converts to open-access publishing ("gold"), like BMC!

(I could easily aggregate and print and sell a cut-rate version of
Nature the day after it appears, using the author self-archived versions,
if Nature agreed to renounce exclusive publication rights!)

But most toll-access publishers are not ready or willing to convert
to gold at this time. So if "open access" were defined to include only
toll-free access coupled with republication rights, self-archiving would
not be providing open access!

And toll-access publishers can demonstrate their support for open access
-- and help encourage their authors to provide open access through
self-archiving -- by becoming "green": formally endorsing author
self-archiving.

If only what BMC provides could be defined as "open access" that might
be good for BMC, but not for open access!

> I can't escape the thought that the discussion questioning the need to
> have these conditions/rights in the definition of Open Access betrays a
> less than full transition in thinking from the '(copy)rights-mongering'
> model of publishing to the 'service' model. After the publisher has
> been paid for the service of having the material properly peer-reviewed,
> made 'web-ready' and embedded in the literature via reference-linking,
> OAI-compliance, inclusion in secondary services and OA archives et cetera,
> the publisher has, in my view, no business exercising any control over
> the material anymore.

The publisher has no business exercising such control if the publisher
is a gold publisher, i.e., in the open-access publishing business! But
not if the publisher is a toll-access (green) publisher, and the open
access is being provided by the author/institution.

Jan, what you don't seem to want to see is that open-access provision
is not the same as open-access publication! Open-access publication can
add on some more values, but those are just added-values, not
necessities.

The necessities are "immediate, permanent, toll-free, online, webwide
access to the full-text of a journal article (readable, downloadable,
storable, printable, computer-processable) for anyon

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Jan Velterop]

Peter,

I beg to differ. Maybe to the letter these things are not  'conditios
sine qua non' for Open Access, but they pretty much are 'conditios sine
qua useless'. The exception is perhaps the copyright provision, as any
copyrightholder can assign the article to Open Access; it doesn't have
to be the author. But the other points are important, and in my view
part and parcel of Open Access, indeed of its whole 'reason d'etre',
and not just 'supportive practices'.

What is Open Access worth if an article is 'open' but not easily
universally accessible? For that we need OAI-compliance.

What is Open Access if not in a public archive, outside the reach of
whatever residual power of the publisher and the chance to get lost? Don't
underestimate the risks here.

What is Open Access if not with the right to complete re-use, even
'commercial'? Let's not forget that 'commercial' doesn't always entail
immense profits. It also covers the local printer who takes an Open Access
article, prints it, brings it to places that the Web doesn't (yet) reach,
and makes a modest profit in the process. If that should be proscribed,
access isn't truly open.

This last issue, by the way, exposes a flaw in the Bethesda, Wellcome and
Berlin declarations. They still speak of allowing 'a limited number of
print copies for personal use'. We, at BioMed Central, don't agree, and we
therefore impose no restrictions whatsoever on the number of print copies.
Relinquishing them would threaten income in the old model, but not anymore
in the Open Access model, so what's the point of restrictions anyway?

I can't escape the thought that the discussion questioning the need to
have these conditions/rights in the definition of Open Access betrays a
less than full transition in thinking from the '(copy)rights-mongering'
model of publishing to the 'service' model. After the publisher has
been paid for the service of having the material properly peer-reviewed,
made 'web-ready' and embedded in the literature via reference-linking,
OAI-compliance, inclusion in secondary services and OA archives et cetera,
the publisher has, in my view, no business exercising any control over
the material anymore.

Best wishes for an Open Access 2004 to you all!

Jan


-----Original Message-
From: Peter Suber
To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org
Sent: 1/2/04 5:28 PM
Subject: Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

Sally,

I'm sorry it has taken me so long to reply to your helpful post.
More below.

At 09:02 AM 12/31/2003 +0100, Sally Morris wrote:

[Omitting short descriptions of OA journals and OA archives.]

> In neither case is any of the following a sine qua non, though they
> appear to be 'articles of faith' for some:
>
> *Copyright retention by the author, or the author's institution
(or, for
> that matter, absence of copyright - i.e. 'public domain')
> *OAI compliance
> *Absence of restrictions on re-use (including commercial re-use)
> *Deposit in a specific type of archive
>
> Am I alone in seeing it this way?

No, you're not alone.  I agree with you about three of the four.  Let me
take your points in order.

* OA doesn't require authors to retain copyright.  It requires the
copyright holder (whoever that is) to consent to OA.  But because
authors are much more likely to consent to OA than journals, letting
authors retain copyright is an important sub-goal for the OA movement.

When authors ask to retain copyright and are denied, they should ask for
permission to archive the postprint.

* OA doesn't require OAI-compliance.  OAI-compliance makes open-access
archives more useful, by making them interoperable.  But it doesn't make
them open-access.  However, because it makes them more useful, spreading
OAI-compliance is also an important sub-goal for the open-access
movement.

* I do believe that OA requires the absence of most copyright and
licensing restrictions, or what I have called permission barriers.  It
does not require the public domain, or absence of all these
restrictions, although that's one important path to OA.

We can quibble about exactly which rights copyright holders should waive
in order to make OA possible.  Here's my personal list:  the copyright
holder should consent in advance to unrestricted reading, downloading,
copying, sharing, storing, printing, searching, linking, and crawling.
This is compatible with retaining the right to block the distribution of
mangled and misattributed copies.

Commercial reuse is the tough one.  I've always thought that OA was
compatible with commercial reuse, and still think so.  But I once
thought that OA authors shouldn't consent to it, and now I think they
should.  However, as I put it in FOSN for 1/30/02, <

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Barbara Kirsop]

Dear All,

I have sympathised with Stevan's New Year message on the
misunderstandings and digressions regarding acceptance of OA (see
american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org). We faced all these
uncertainties at the Bangalore workshop last year and developed a FAQ
similar to Stevan's for the EPT web site (www.epublishingtrust.org). The
present discussions on the AmSci forum on whether 'open' is the same
as/different from 'free' access and comparing this with the need to feed
the starving now or wait a bit til everyone can have 'organic' food is
spot on. I reflect that these discussions, erudite and entertaining as
they are, are of little interest to science in the developing world.
Scientists (and patients with malaria) in the developing world need the
information now, asap, in any format that can best be provided, don't
wait til everything is perfect, just do it. And science in the developed
world equally needs the highly relevant research from the developing
regions now - though it mostly doesn't recognise this knowledge gap.

So I was pleased to read the message from Dr. T.B. Rajashekar of the IIS
that he and his colleagues plan to promote and inform the scientists
in India about their institutional archive (eprints.iisc.ernet.in) in
the coming months. Great. Perhaps the most important message that is
least understood by scientists is that they can 'do it now' and still
continue to publish in their favoured journals, in parallel. We are all
naturally hesitant to give up the system we know and love and trust, so
people should understand that there is no need to. Just do it now and the
world will not collapse around them, they will not be criticised by their
colleagues, but infinitely more fellow scientists will be aware of their
research, their organisations will be promoted and they will themselves
have contributed to the global knowledge pool, currently only half-filled.

So good luck to Raja, to Arun's indefatigable efforts and to the
excellent Bioline (www.bioline.org.br) for helping the developing
country publishers understand OA and providing a place for them to do it
(eprints.utsc.utoronto.ca). Maybe we would be right, as Arun suggests, to
focus on India, China and Brazil first, and maybe the 2004 e-publishing
workshop in Brasilia could be a start, and could be cloned for other
regions?

Barbara

Stevan Harnad wrote:

> On Fri, 2 Jan 2004, Subbiah Arunachalam wrote:
>
>>Please visit  < http://paniit.iitd.ac.in/indest/extended/
>> > and look up the presentations
>>and recommendations made at the INDEST meeting held in October. INDEST is a
>>consortium of libraries of select higher education institutions in India.
>>
>>Their emphasis on theses is surprising. The substance of every thesis
>>appears in research papers published in journals. Besides, many theses from
>>Indian universities are of dubious value, although IISc and IITs are a lot
>>different from the run-of-the-mill Indian university.
>
> Dear Arun,
>
> As time goes by, the OA initiative begins to look like a microcosm of
> all human history and human folly. I don't know that I have learned as
> much about life from anything else.
>
> The answer to your question of why it is that this INDEST meeting
> seems to grasp so little is that it is very much like other such
> meetings worldwide, for at least a decade now. Although there is nothing
> conceptually deep or even practically revolutionary about any of this,
> it has become obvious that it is prone to a seemingly endless series of
> systematic misunderstandings and digressions, never quite able to get to
> (or grasp, or stick to, or act upon) the point.
>
> The reasons are both local and global. At this particular INDEST meeting,
> one obvious reason is that it is again primarily a meeting of the library
> community, which is well-meaning and (because of the pressure of the
> serials budget crisis) was the first messenger to alert us all that
> something was amiss and needed to be done.
>
> But having drawn our attention to the access problem, the library
> community has proved unable either to see the solution or (in the
> minority of cases where it did see the solution) unable to get the
> research community to do anything about it.
>
> The preoccupation with dissertations is typical, and has happened
> repeatedly worldwide. Dissertations are paradigmatic examples of the
> "grayish" literature that it is the easiest to (mis)focus upon and take to
> be the paradigm for a solution: It does not consist exactly of published
> books, it is university output, and it has a visibility/accessibility
> problem. In that way it is reminiscent of the refereed-journal literature.
>
> The idea that providing open access to institutional dissertation
> output would be one good start toward providing open access to all
> institutional research output seemed a promising one, but in practise
> it has gotten bogged down -- partly in one of the library's c

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Peter Suber]

Sally,

I'm sorry it has taken me so long to reply to your helpful post.
More below.

At 09:02 AM 12/31/2003 +0100, Sally Morris wrote:

[Omitting short descriptions of OA journals and OA archives.]

> In neither case is any of the following a sine qua non, though they
> appear to be 'articles of faith' for some:
>
> *Copyright retention by the author, or the author's institution (or, for
> that matter, absence of copyright - i.e. 'public domain')
> *OAI compliance
> *Absence of restrictions on re-use (including commercial re-use)
> *Deposit in a specific type of archive
>
> Am I alone in seeing it this way?

No, you're not alone.  I agree with you about three of the four.  Let me
take your points in order.

* OA doesn't require authors to retain copyright.  It requires the
copyright holder (whoever that is) to consent to OA.  But because
authors are much more likely to consent to OA than journals, letting
authors retain copyright is an important sub-goal for the OA movement.

When authors ask to retain copyright and are denied, they should ask for
permission to archive the postprint.

* OA doesn't require OAI-compliance.  OAI-compliance makes open-access
archives more useful, by making them interoperable.  But it doesn't make
them open-access.  However, because it makes them more useful, spreading
OAI-compliance is also an important sub-goal for the open-access
movement.

* I do believe that OA requires the absence of most copyright and
licensing restrictions, or what I have called permission barriers.  It
does not require the public domain, or absence of all these
restrictions, although that's one important path to OA.

We can quibble about exactly which rights copyright holders should waive
in order to make OA possible.  Here's my personal list:  the copyright
holder should consent in advance to unrestricted reading, downloading,
copying, sharing, storing, printing, searching, linking, and crawling.
This is compatible with retaining the right to block the distribution of
mangled and misattributed copies.

Commercial reuse is the tough one.  I've always thought that OA was
compatible with commercial reuse, and still think so.  But I once
thought that OA authors shouldn't consent to it, and now I think they
should.  However, as I put it in FOSN for 1/30/02, <
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-30-02.htm
 >, "I want
to make this preference genial, or compatible with the opposite
preference, so that the [OA] movement can recruit and retain authors who
oppose commercial use."

* In my view, OA does not require deposit in a specific type of archive.
However, the Bethesda and BMC definitions of OA take the opposite view.
In any case, archiving is one direct path to OA itself, and in addition
makes journal-published OA articles more useful.

It's rarely important to separate "OA itself" from "practices that make
OA more likely or more useful".  On the contrary, it's usually important
to defend all of these at once.  But when we need to separate the
definition of OA from supportive practices (authors retaining copyright,
deposit in certain kinds of archives, steps toward long-term
preservation...), then see the start I made toward clarification in SOAF
for 8/4/03, < http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-04-03.htm
 >.

 Peter
  _

Peter Suber
Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College
Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge
Author, SPARC Open Access Newsletter
Editor, Open Access News blog
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/ 
peter.su...@earlham.edu

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

In the following, I respond to multiple postings: (a) one by Peter Suber,
(b) three by Mike Eisen, and (c) one by Seth Johnson.

Happy New Year to All! S.H.

--
(a) Peter Suber wrote:

> Self-archiving is a true open-access strategy, not merely a free-access
> strategy.  Authors who self-archive their articles are consenting not only
> to price-free access, but to a range of scholarly uses that exceeds "fair
> use".

That is a great relief to hear, Peter!

As long as both BOAI-1 and BOAI-2 are unambiguously on the same side
of the "free/open" distinction (i.e., the "open" side), there can
be no objection to calling *other* forms of access -- gerrymandered
ebrary-style access, for example, which blocks downloading and allows
only on-screen viewing -- merely "free access" rather than "open
access" (as immediately agreed in the posting that first launched this
thread: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2956.html )

Self-archiving authors of course do not provide mere ebrary-style access,
for that would largely defeat their purpose in self-archiving, which is
to maximise the usage and impact of their work.

> We can quibble about what authors really consent to, since there is no
> consent form connected to the self-archiving process.  But at least the
> BOAI was clear on what it called on authors to consent to under the name of
> "open access":
> "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."
> This list of permissible uses is not intrinsic to price-free access and
> needed explicit enumeration.  Moreover, it exceeds fair use as provided by
> copyright law.

Yes, it is intrinsic to BOAI-1 (the self-archiving strategy for providing
open access) that inherent in making one's full-texts publicly accessible
toll-free on the Web are all the capabilities that one normally has with
material on the web. No new rights agreement with the publisher is needed
for open-access provision via self-archiving (though it is helpful if the
publisher has an explicit "green" policy of supporting self-archiving).

BOAI-2 (the open-access journal-publishing strategy for providing open
access), being a form of *publishing,* necessarily has to have some
form of rights agreement (even if it is just full copyright retention by
the author). The most desirable agreement is the creative commons license,
but that is not necessarily the only possibility. Something very like
an ordinary toll-access publisher's copyright/licensing agreement, but
with the publisher formally agreeing to provide immediate, permanent,
(ungerrymandered), toll-free full-text online access (i.e., the publisher
archiving all contents rather than each individual author having to do it)
would (by my lights) be open-access (gold) publishing even if exclusive
republication rights were held by the publisher.

It is not that I don't see the extra value that would be conferred by
the further uses allowed by the creative commons license! I am merely
thinking of what would win over a reluctant white or green publisher to
converting to gold. It is very likely that they will feel it less of a
risk to convert if they retain exclusive republication rights (including
the exclusive right to publish and try to keep selling the toll-access
version, on-paper and online!), just in case they cannot make ends meet
with author-institution publication charges.

(Of course, I am fully confident that the very *nature* of open access
itself will ensure that none of these extra revenue-making options
proves either lucrative or necessary in order to make ends meet: The
natural, optimal, and inevitable outcome is that peer-reviewed journal
publishing will all downsize to become peer-review service-provision and
certification, and nothing else. That will be what online peer-reviewed
journal publishing *means*. But time's 'awasting, and if we insist that
the leap be made all at once, in advance, the leap will simply be delayed!)
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm

>sh> I will frankly say that I not only consider the free/open distinction to
>sh> be an ill-conceived and insubstantial after-thought and a red herring;
>sh> but, if sustained and promoted, I believe it will add yet another a
>sh> huge and needless delay to the provision of the toll-free, full-text,
>sh> online access that (for me, at least) this has always been about, since
>sh> the advent of the online era.
>
> It's not ill-conceived because price barriers are different in kind from
> permission barriers; we might face either one without facing the
> other.  It's not

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Seth Johnson]

-Original Message-
From: Stevan Harnad 
List-Post: goal@eprints.org
List-Post: goal@eprints.org
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 16:44:29 +
Subject: Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

> All would-be users need to be able to read, download, store,
> print-off and perhaps also computer-process those texts.


Not "perhaps" computer-process.  Being able to use published
information is the whole reason we give people exclusive rights at all.

This is what "publishing" means.  It gives us information, which once
published is intrinsically free.


> What exactly are the uses that this excludes, uses that we would need
> to surmount permission barriers in order to gain?


There are fundamental rights and freedoms involved, whatever the
statutory framework might seem to indicate.


> > Do we need to remove permission barriers even when readers have
> > fair-use rights?  Yes.  Fair use does not include permission to
> > copy 100% of an article, let alone forward it to a colleague or
> > store it for your own use.  Open access includes permission for
> > these important and increasingly routine acts of research.
>
> What fair use is needed beyond webwide toll-free access?
>
> 1. You want to read it? Go ahead?
>
> 2. Download it? Go ahead.
>
> 3. Print it (for yourself)? Go ahead.
>
> 4. Forward it to a colleague? Forward him the URL!
>
> 5. "Copy 100%?" Copy it where? Onto your screen? Go ahead.
>
> 6. Onto your computer disk (i.e., download)? Go ahead.
>
> 7. Onto paper? Go ahead.
>
> 8. Into one of your own articles, which you then submit to
> a publisher? Either get the copyright holder's permission or insert
> excerpts plus the URL.
>
> 9. Into an edited on-paper collection? Either get the copyright
> holder's permission or insert excerpts plus the URL.
>
> Am I missing something? It seems to me that we have all the access
> and use we could possibly want here, without going so far as to
> stipulate what sort of velum it should appear on before declaring
> the access truly open!


This is a "legally-safe" analysis.  It goes just as far as it goes.


> We are in the online age! Inserting the open-access URL into any
> online text is the online successor to copying or cut/pasting it!
> What can be re-published *on paper* is moot (and probably mostly
> obsolete) in the online age, but that is certainly nothing to hold
> back toll-free online access for (or to withhold the "open access"
> descriptor from)! This was all about (and all made possible by)
> *online* access, not on-paper access (even as on-paper publication
> and distribution fades away).


"Legally-safe," once again.


> Is any useful purpose really served by holding the term "open access"
> hostage to niggles like this? Doesn't it make far more sense to
> invite and welcome a lot more open access with the natural inclusive
> use of the term, rather than to hold it at arm's length as
> being "merely" free, but not "open"! (And at a time when most of
> this literature is nowhere near being "merely free"?)


This is a strange dispute.  Evidently the proponents of the "not
merely free" position are using the term "free" in the "free as in
beer" sense, not in the "free as in freedom" sense.


> I think we are not only over-reaching our grasp with this sort of
> semiological exclusiveness, but we are doing it for nothing, for
> trifles, and at the cost of the true riches. This putative
> "free/open" distinction has lost perspective, perhaps even lost
> sight of the real problem (we don't yet *have* 1-9: we're nowhere
> near it!), and gotten buried instead in illusory frills -- and
> formalisms...
>
> And none of this "free vs. open" business is either explicit or
> implicit in what we agreed that "open access" meant when we founded
> the BOAI.
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess


The indeterminacies around this area are why I did not sign the BOAI
when I was asked to -- I look for strong positions for freedom as
such, not the pursuit of "openness," whatever perspective the
participants in this dispute take on the term.

Both sides should just grant that they are each pursuing freedom by
different means, and recognize the dispute as a whole has already
subsumed itself under the lesser term of "openness," which says little
about how exclusive rights policy and knowledge as such (of whatever
sort) *should* be understood.  Don't try to settle this; just continue
your various approaches.  I would encourage you to try to take harder
positions, to directly violate premises of those who seek to restr

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Michael Eisen]

Stevan-

You say:

> Am I missing something? It seems to me that we have all the access and
> use we could possibly want here, without going so far as to stipulate what
> sort of velum it should appear on before declaring the access truly open!

Yes, you are missing something. You seem intent on narrowly circumscribing
the possible uses of the literature to include only those that amount to
reading and citing works, thereby needlessly limiting both current and
future uses, and it is absurd to dismissing other possible uses as "perks"
that exist only to promote open access journals.

I will await your reply to my earlier posting before I reiterate, once
again, the types of uses that you have left off of your "exhaustive" list of
possible uses of the literature.

> And none of this "free vs. open" business is either explicit or implicit
> in what we agreed that "open access" meant when we founded the BOAI.
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess

I don't see how you can possibly say this. The definition from BOAI 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."

But you seem to be editing out the rights to distribute and use the
literature.

I don't recall it ever coming up in Budapest that we were endorsing flavors
of open access where these key elements were missing. It was always assumed
that the two strategies were alternative ways of achieving this end - a
belief that I still strongly endorse. Open access, in the true BOAI sense,
can be readily achieved by self-archiving. But - and I think this is the
crux of the current argument - self-archiving does not in and of itself
achieve open access, especially when its chief proponent is dismissing
critical parts of the open access definition as spurious. By relaixng the
definition of open access in order to appease publisher you may achieve free
access more rapidly, but this will not be without a cost.

> But before I reply I would like to introduce two historical/factual
> points, and one logical point that they entail, for reflection:
>
> (1) Let's ask ourselves what it was, exactly, that changed, with the
> advent of the online age, insofar as the specific literature we are
> discussing here -- which I must never tire to remind everyone is the
> annual 2.5 million articles published in the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed
> journals -- is concerned?
>
> Others may have other answers, but by my lights what changed was nothing
> more or less than the *means* and the *cost* of making one's peer-reviewed
> research accessible to would-be users: In the on-paper era, access had to be
> restricted to those users whose institutions could afford the subscription
> access tolls, and the potential usage and impact from those would-be
> users whose institutions could not afford the access tolls had to be
> renounced as lost -- in order to ensure the recovery of the substantial
> real costs of on-paper publication (without which there would be no access
> or impact at all).
>
> In the on-line era it became possible, at last, (a) for researchers,
> if they wished, to make their peer-reviewed articles accessible to
> all would-be users toll-free, by self-archiving them on the web, and
> thereby putting an end to their lost potential impact. It also become
> possible (b) for publishers, if they wished, to cut the costs of on-paper
> publication and recover the much lower on-line-only costs by charging
> the author-institution a fee per outgoing article published instead of by
> charging user-institutions an access-toll per journal or article accessed.
> http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/

It's certainly true that the means and costs changed - but that is certainly
not all! What also changed was that it became possible to begin moving
beyond the limitations on the creative use of the knowledge contained in the
scientific literature imposed by the printed page. Saying that all that
changed for scientific publishing in the on-line era is that it became
possible to expose a greater chunk of the world to our writing, is, in my
mind, like saying all that changed for society with the birth of the
internet was that it became easier and cheaper to send letters to our
friends and family.

> In neither case is any of the following a sine qua non, though they appear
> to be 'articles of faith' for some:
>
> *Copyright retention by the author, or the author's instit

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Peter Suber]

At 03:16 PM 12/31/2003 +, Stevan Harnad wrote:

>The discussion of the Free/Open Access distinction appears to
>be growing. I see that Peter Suber has posted a reply to the
>SOAF list, which I will re-post to the Amsci Forum in a moment
>so I can reply to it on both lists after I have replied to
>Mike Eisen (in prep.!).

[...]

>(3) If BOAI-1 (self-archiving) indeed yielded only "free" access but not
>"open" access:
>
> (i) Why would we dub BOAI-1 an "open-access" strategy rather than
> merely a "free-access" strategy?

Self-archiving is a true open-access strategy, not merely a free-access
strategy.  Authors who self-archive their articles are consenting not only
to price-free access, but to a range of scholarly uses that exceeds "fair
use".

We can quibble about what authors really consent to, since there is no
consent form connected to the self-archiving process.  But at least the
BOAI was clear on what it called on authors to consent to under the name of
"open access":
"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."
This list of permissible uses is not intrinsic to price-free access and
needed explicit enumeration.  Moreover, it exceeds fair use as provided by
copyright law.

>I will frankly say that I not only consider the free/open distinction to
>be an ill-conceived and insubstantial after-thought and a red herring;
>but, if sustained and promoted, I believe it will add yet another a
>huge and needless delay to the provision of the toll-free, full-text,
>online access that (for me, at least) this has always been about, since
>the advent of the online era.

It's not ill-conceived because price barriers are different in kind from
permission barriers; we might face either one without facing the
other.  It's not an after-thought because it was already contained in the
BOAI.  It's not a red herring because we must remove permission barriers as
well as price barriers in order to maximize the impact and usefulness of
research articles.

I don't see the argument for the claim that my definition of "open access"
will cause delay.

>Must we remind ourselves that what we need -- and don't have, but
>could have virtually overnight if we make up our minds we want it --
>is maximised research impact through maximised research access? Isn't that
>what this is all about? That does *not* mean holding out for XML mark-up,
>raising the goal-posts so that only XML articles are seen as meeting the
>goal, and withholding the title of having met the goal from any article
>that is not XML -- while the *real* problem, which is the continuing
>toll-barriers to access and impact, just keeps on festering, unremedied!

If you're still replying to me, then this misses the target.  I never said
"open access" included XML mark-up!  Please reread my note.  I merely said
that open access removes both price and permission barriers, not just price
barriers.

Mike Eisen didn't say that open access included XML mark-up either.  He
merely said that XML mark-up is desirable, and that permission to do it is
not part of fair use; and he's right about both points.

  Peter

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Michael Eisen wrote:

> First, for the sake of clarity, can we just agree that, whatever relative
> value you place on the two, free access and open access are not equivalent
> and that it does no one any good to confuse the two.

We can agree for the sake of clarity that an attempt is being made to
formulate a distinction between "open access" and "free access." But
it is my contention that it is the distinction itself that causes the
confusion, because it is empty and divisive, leading to what should be
open-access allies saying to one another: "You are not promoting 'open
access' but merely 'free access.'"

No, they are not equivalent. But let us be very clear on what the putative
differences between them are, so we can weigh whether they have any substance.

> Free access gives all potential users immediate and permanent toll-free
> access to the text at a single fixed point on the internet (e.g. a
> self-archive or a journal website).

At a single fixed point on the internet? How many points does toll-free
full-text access have to be provided *from* if everyone, anywhere,
any time, can get it from that "single fixed point"? (Is this just
about mirroring, caching, band-width and redundancy?)

> Copyright would (in general) reside with
> authors or their assignee, and users would have fair use rights, such as the
> right to read, print, crawl and mine this copy of the article, but in
> general would not have any further rights, such as the right to redistribute
> or make derivative works.

Correct. They can't *republish* the work on paper (without
permissions). But they can redistribute the URL of the "single fixed
point" all they like -- which is what online-age open access means!

> Open access grants all of the rights inherent to free access

Free access is not a *right,* it is a *capability* -- toll-free online
access to and use of the full-text -- a capability provided either by the
publisher (BOAI-2, open-access journal publishing) or by the author (BOAI-1,
open-access self-archiving of toll-access articles). No new rights need
to be granted to provide toll-free full-text access (though it is nice
if -- when it is done via self-archiving -- the toll-access journal is
"green," i.e., gives its official blessing to author self-archiving,
as 55% already do).

> but the
> copyright holders grant (by signing some form of license) all users
> additional rights, especially the right to redistribute and make derivative
> works, in general asking only that the original work be properly cited. (The
> different definitions of open access are not identical, but all essentially
> say this).

No, I do not think granting the right to *republish* (i.e., include the
text in someone else's subsequent publication, or to publish it on paper
in a collected work) is at all inherent in the meaning of open access;
nor do I think it is important or necessary for someone else to be able
to republish my text in his online article, or to republish my text in his
online collection of papers (though I, for one, would almost always
grant anyone the permission to do so).

The only thing that is urgent, and important, is that any would-be user
of my text, webwide, should be able to read, download, store, print out,
computer-process, use, build-upon, apply and cite my text without his
institution's having to pay an access-toll to do it. *That* is open access.

(If you want to redistribute my text, send out the URL! no need to waste
bandwidth or paper sending out the text itself.)

> I hope we can agree that these are not equivalent, so that we can get onto
> the more important question, which is is this a meaningful difference - that
> is, are the additional rights given to users under open access meaningful,
> and does granting them benefit authors, readers and the research community
> in general. Obviously, you think the answer is no, while I think it is yes.

I am not sure how I, as author, am benefited if I grant a blanket right
to *republish* my text, either as part of someone else's published text,
online or on-paper, or as part of a collection someone is putting together
on paper. I think I'd rather be consulted, case by case. Otherwise they
can just insert the URL.

So much for *republishing* my text. But anyone is certainly free to *use*
my text in any way they wish, in their research or teaching. That's
open access. It pertains to use. The right to republish should be
called something else. It's not an open-access matter (though perhaps
an open-access *publication* matter: and that's the point, open-access
provision is not the same thing as open-access publication!)

> I address your 6 points below, although I think that you are conflating two
> different points.

That may be -- but it's sure a relief to see someone else using the word
"conflate" for a change...  ;>)

> 1) Open access is unnecessary - everything that a user would want to do with
> a paper they can do with free access.
> 2) Open access

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

As Peter Suber's comment is shorter, I will reply to it first, even though it 
came
after Mike Eisen's. The reply will give a foretaste of what the reply to Mike 
will
be:

On Wed, 31 Dec 2003, Peter Suber wrote:

> Here's how I've put it e.g. in
> .  There are two important
> kinds of access barriers:  price barriers and permission barriers.  Free
> online access removes price barriers.  Open access removes both price and
> permission barriers.

But there are two relevant details to keep in mind:

(1) Barriers to what? What literature are we talking about? And what uses
of it?

(2) How many of the uses that are purportedly blocked by permission barriers are
in fact already gained by removing the price barriers (toll-free access)?

We are talking only about refereed journal articles (24,000 journals,
2.5 million articles a year) not about other kinds of literature. All
would-be users need to be able to read, download, store, print-off
and perhaps also computer-process those texts. They can do all that with
(immediate, permanent, webwide) toll-free full-text access.

What exactly are the uses that this excludes, uses that we would need to
surmount permission barriers in order to gain?

> Do we need to remove permission barriers even when readers have fair-use
> rights?  Yes.  Fair use does not include permission to copy 100% of an
> article, let alone forward it to a colleague or store it for your own
> use.  Open access includes permission for these important and increasingly
> routine acts of research.

What fair use is needed beyond webwide toll-free access?

1. You want to read it? Go ahead?

2. Download it? Go ahead.

3. Print it (for yourself)? Go ahead.

4. Forward it to a colleague? Forward him the URL!

5. "Copy 100%?" Copy it where? Onto your screen? Go ahead.

6. Onto your computer disk (i.e., download)? Go ahead.

7. Onto paper? Go ahead.

8. Into one of your own articles, which you then submit to
a publisher? Either get the copyright holder's permission or insert
excerpts plus the URL.

9. Into an edited on-paper collection? Either get the copyright holder's
permission or insert excerpts plus the URL.

Am I missing something? It seems to me that we have all the access and
use we could possibly want here, without going so far as to stipulate what
sort of velum it should appear on before declaring the access truly open!

We are in the online age! Inserting the open-access URL into any online
text is the online successor to copying or cut/pasting it! What can be
re-published *on paper* is moot (and probably mostly obsolete) in the
online age, but that is certainly nothing to hold back toll-free online
access for (or to withhold the "open access" descriptor from)! This was
all about (and all made possible by) *online* access, not on-paper access
(even as on-paper publication and distribution fades away).

Is any useful purpose really served by holding the term "open access"
hostage to niggles like this? Doesn't it make far more sense to invite
and welcome a lot more open access with the natural inclusive use of the
term, rather than to hold it at arm's length as being "merely" free, but not
"open"! (And at a time when most of this literature is nowhere near being
"merely free"?)

I think we are not only over-reaching our grasp with this sort of
semiological exclusiveness, but we are doing it for nothing, for trifles,
and at the cost of the true riches. This putative "free/open" distinction
has lost perspective, perhaps even lost sight of the real problem (we
don't yet *have* 1-9: we're nowhere near it!), and gotten buried instead
in illusory frills -- and formalisms...

And none of this "free vs. open" business is either explicit or implicit
in what we agreed that "open access" meant when we founded the BOAI.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess

I can see why promoting such putative extra perks might be useful in promoting
open-access journals, but I don't understand why you, Peter, with your 
ecumenism,
are also advocating this free/open split.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/forum/?letter=20030811sh

(For a split it certainly is: If promoting toll-free access to toll-access
articles through self-archiving is not promoting open access, then I am
not, and never have been, promoting open access! Nor was Harold Varmus, in
his original E-Biomed proposal. Nor has Andrew Odlyzko, or Steve Lawrence,
or anyone else other than open-access journal promotors! Surely a line
of reasoning that has that as a punchline calls for some re-thinking
about the putative free/open distinction.)

I strongly recommend instead our all uniting under the unified open-access
provision strategy (below), and dropping this spurious free/open split.

Stevan Harnad

NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at
the American Scientist Open Access Forum (98 & 99 

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Peter Suber]

I agree with Mike.

Here's how I've put it e.g. in
.  There are two important
kinds of access barriers:  price barriers and permission barriers.  Free
online access removes price barriers.  Open access removes both price and
permission barriers.

Do we need to remove permission barriers even when readers have fair-use
rights?  Yes.  Fair use does not include permission to copy 100% of an
article, let alone forward it to a colleague or store it for your own
use.  Open access includes permission for these important and increasingly
routine acts of research.

 Peter

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

The discussion of the Free/Open Access distinction appears to
be growing. I see that Peter Suber has posted a reply to the
SOAF list, which I will re-post to the Amsci Forum in a moment
so I can reply to it on both lists after I have replied to
Mike Eisen (in prep.!).

But before I reply I would like to introduce two historical/factual
points, and one logical point that they entail, for reflection:

(1) Let's ask ourselves what it was, exactly, that changed, with the
advent of the online age, insofar as the specific literature we are
discussing here -- which I must never tire to remind everyone is the
annual 2.5 million articles published in the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed
journals -- is concerned?

Others may have other answers, but by my lights what changed was nothing
more or less than the *means* and the *cost* of making one's peer-reviewed
research accessible to would-be users: In the on-paper era, access had to be
restricted to those users whose institutions could afford the subscription
access tolls, and the potential usage and impact from those would-be
users whose institutions could not afford the access tolls had to be
renounced as lost -- in order to ensure the recovery of the substantial
real costs of on-paper publication (without which there would be no access
or impact at all).

In the on-line era it became possible, at last, (a) for researchers,
if they wished, to make their peer-reviewed articles accessible to
all would-be users toll-free, by self-archiving them on the web, and
thereby putting an end to their lost potential impact. It also become
possible (b) for publishers, if they wished, to cut the costs of on-paper
publication and recover the much lower on-line-only costs by charging
the author-institution a fee per outgoing article published instead of by
charging user-institutions an access-toll per journal or article accessed.
http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/

Again, by my lights: (a) and (b) were quasi-independent: Authors might
(or might not) choose to maximise their research impact by providing
toll-free access to their full-text articles online; and publishers might
(or might not) choose to convert to providing toll-free full-text access
by cutting costs and recovering them from author-institution fees.

(2) Until (what subsequently became known as) the "Budapest Open Access
Initiative" meeting in December 2001, (a) and (b) did not really have
a name, but at that meeting (a) and (b) were baptised, respectively,
as BOAI open-access strategy 1 and BOAI open-access strategy 2 --
where "open access" was the toll-free access in question and BOAI-1 and
BOAI-2 were the two means of attaining it.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess

"The purpose of the meeting was to accelerate progress in the
international effort to make research articles in all academic fields
freely available on the internet."
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/

"To achieve open access to scholarly journal literature, we recommend
two complementary strategies... Open access to peer-reviewed journal
literature is the goal. Self-archiving (I.) and a new generation of
open-access journals (II.) are the ways to attain this goal."
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml

---

(1) and (2) were my two historical/factual points. Now the logical point:

(3) If BOAI-1 (self-archiving) indeed yielded only "free" access but not
"open" access:

(i) Why would we dub BOAI-1 an "open-access" strategy rather than
merely a "free-access" strategy?

And (ii) why would we call the Budapest Open Access Initiative the BOAI
rather than the "Budapest Open Access Publishing Initiative" ("BOAPI")
-- since "open access" can only be had by publishing in an open
access journal?

I will frankly say that I not only consider the free/open distinction to
be an ill-conceived and insubstantial after-thought and a red herring;
but, if sustained and promoted, I believe it will add yet another a
huge and needless delay to the provision of the toll-free, full-text,
online access that (for me, at least) this has always been about, since
the advent of the online era.

(And I will be forced to re-baptise the American Scientist Open Access
Forum -- yet again -- as the "American Scientist Toll-Free Access Forum"!)

I hope not! I hope we will let neither semiological quibbles nor
gratuitous superadded handicaps keep holding us back from the optimal
and the inevitable outcome.

Must we remind ourselves that what we need -- and don't have, but
could have virtually overnight if we make up our minds we want it --
is maximised research impact through maximised research access? Isn't that
what this is all about? That does *not* mean holding out for XML mark-up,
raising the goal-posts so that only XML articles are seen as meeting the
goal, and withholding the title of having met the goal from any article
that is not XML

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Jan Velterop]

Sally Morris wrote:

> The core, essential feature is free, unrestricted access (to primary
> research articles) for everyone.   This can take 2 forms:
>
> 1)In Stevan's term, 'self-archiving' - posting, generally
> by authors or institutions, of preprints, postprints or both, on
> personal/departmental websites, discipline-based archives, or - more
> recently - institutional archives.   These may or may not replicate what
> appears in published journals;  many, but not all, publishers readily
> permit this.  The articles may or not be OAI-discoverable.
>
> 2)What are becoming known as 'Open Access journals' - that is to say,
> journals which (in all probability) maintain the traditional standards
> of peer review, and as much as possible of the other value that the
> publication process adds (editing, linking etc), but which recover costs
> (not forgetting overheads, and whatever degree of surplus/profit is
> necessary to the operation of the organisation doing the publishing)
> in some other way than by charging for access.
>
> In neither case is any of the following a sine qua non, though they
> appear to be 'articles of faith' for some:
>
> *Copyright retention by the author, or the author's institution (or,
>  for that matter, absence of copyright - i.e. 'public domain')
> *OAI compliance
> *Absence of restrictions on re-use (including commercial re-use)
> *Deposit in a specific type of archive
>
> Am I alone in seeing it this way?
> Sally

Sally,

The points you list are in my view all 'sine qua non'for Open
Access, with the possible exception of the copyright, which can be held
by anybody else, as long as the full attribution licence is signed by
that copyrightholder.

I'm fully with Mike in this discussion. He put it admirably clearly.

Happy New Year to you all!

Jan

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

tous toll-free, full-text
online access moots many potential re-uses -- how many of them are
still worth paying for, when the full-text is online, toll-free? --
there is absolutely no incompatibility between providing open access
to one's own articles yet continuing to allow one's publisher any
of the commercial re-uses that journal article authors had allowed
their publishers in the past. (Here again, lines have crossed between
the special case of refereed journal articles, and other more general
access and rights problems, for example, with book and textbook material,
courseware, multimedia, etc., as well as online self-publication. Those
other worthy causes, and their proposed solutions, including the
Creative Commons Licenses, are simply irrelevant to the special case of
refereed journal particles, where the only problem is access-denial and
impact-loss, and the only solution is open-access provision.)

> *Deposit in a specific type of archive

The only *essential* feature of open access is immediate, permanent,
toll-free online access to the full-text (meaning that anyone,
anywhere, any time, can download it, read it, store it, print it out,
and computer-process it). *That* much the archive must make possible. For
the advantages of institutional over central archives, and OAI-compliant
over arbitrary archives, see above.

> Am I alone in seeing it this way?

Not if the way you see it takes into account the specific details
noted here!

Stevan Harnad

> - Original Message -
> From: "Michael Eisen" 
> To: 
> Sent: Tuesday, December 30, 2003 11:07 PM
> Subject: Re: Free Access vs. Open Access
>
>
> > Stevan,
> >
> > First, for the sake of clarity, can we just agree that, whatever relative
> > value you place on the two, free access and open access are not equivalent
> > and that it does noone any good to confuse the two.
> >
> > Free access gives all potential users immediate and permanent toll-free
> > access to the text at a single fixed point on the internet (e.g. a
> > self-archive or a journal website). Copyright would (in general) reside
> with
> > authors or their assignee, and users would have fair use rights, such as
> the
> > right to read, print, crawl and mine this copy of the article, but in
> > general would not have any further rights, such as the right to
> redistribute
> > or make derivative works.
> >
> > Open access grants all of the rights inherent to free access, but the
> > copyright holders grant (by signing some form of license) all users
> > additional rights, especially the right to redistribute and make
> derivative
> > works, in general asking only that the original work be properly cited.
> (The
> > different definitions of open access are not identical, but all
> essentially
> > say this).
> >
> > I hope we can agree that these are not equivalent, so that we can get onto
> > the more important question, which is is this a meaningful difference -
> that
> > is, are the additional rights given to users under open access meaningful,
> > and does granting them benefit authors, readers and the research community
> > in general. Obviously, you think the answer is no, while I think it is
> yes.
> >
> > I address your 6 points below, although I think that you are conflating
> two
> > different points.
> >
> > 1) Open access is unnecessary - everything that a user would want to do
> with
> > a paper they can do with free access.
> > 2) Open access is an obstacle to free access - demanding that publishers
> > provide open access delays or obstructs their providing free access.
> >
> > I hope my answers below address why I think these are both incorrect.
> >
> > > So here is my list, again:
> > >
> > > (1) UBIQUITOUS DIRECT ONLINE ACCESS MAKES DERIVATIVE ACCESS SUPERFLUOUS:
> > > Once the full-text is immediately, permanently, and ubiquitously
> > > (i.e., webwide) accessible toll-free, so any user anywhere, any time,
> > > can read the full-text on-screen, download it, store it, print it off,
> > > search/grep it, computationally process it, etc. -- which any user can
> > > do if the author self-archives it -- the further rights and uses that
> > > distinguish "free" from "open" become either moot or supererogatory:
> > >
> >
> > If all you are concerned about is getting toll free access to papers - in
> > the form that they exist in self-archives or on journal websites - then
> the
> > distinction between free and open is superfluous. However many readers
> > (myself included) like to read articles in a familiar and user-friendly
> > for

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Sally Morris]

Pace Stevan, I think this is an interesting discussion and would ask him to
let it run its course unmolested...

I'd see the distinction slightly differently:

The core, essential feature is free, unrestricted access (to primary
research articles) for everyone.   This can take 2 forms:

1)In Stevan's term, 'self-archiving' - posting, generally by authors or
institutions, of preprints, postprints or both, on personal/departmental
websites, discipline-based archives, or - more recently - institutional
archives.   These may or may not replicate what appears in published
journals;  many, but not all, publishers readily permit this.  The articles
may or not be OAI-discoverable.

2)What are becoming known as 'Open Access journals' - that is to say,
journals which (in all probability) maintain the traditional standards of
peer review, and as much as possible of the other value that the publication
process adds (editing, linking etc), but which recover costs (not forgetting
overheads, and whatever degree of surplus/profit is necessary to the
operation of the organisation doing the publishing) in some other way than
by charging for access.

In neither case is any of the following a sine qua non, though they appear
to be 'articles of faith' for some:

*Copyright retention by the author, or the author's institution (or, for
that matter, absence of copyright - i.e. 'public domain')
*OAI compliance
*Absence of restrictions on re-use (including commercial re-use)
*Deposit in a specific type of archive

Am I alone in seeing it this way?

Sally

NOTE NEW EMAIL ADDRESS - PLEASE UPDATE YOUR RECORDS.   THANKS!

Sally Morris, Chief Executive
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK

Phone:  +44 (0)1903 871686 Fax:  +44 (0)1903 871457
E-mail:  chief-e...@alpsp.org
ALPSP Website  http://www.alpsp.org

Our journal, Learned Publishing, is included in the
ALPSP Learned Journals Collection, www.alpsp-collection.org


- Original Message -
From: "Michael Eisen" 
To: 
Sent: Tuesday, December 30, 2003 11:07 PM
Subject: Re: Free Access vs. Open Access


> Stevan,
>
> First, for the sake of clarity, can we just agree that, whatever relative
> value you place on the two, free access and open access are not equivalent
> and that it does noone any good to confuse the two.
>
> Free access gives all potential users immediate and permanent toll-free
> access to the text at a single fixed point on the internet (e.g. a
> self-archive or a journal website). Copyright would (in general) reside
with
> authors or their assignee, and users would have fair use rights, such as
the
> right to read, print, crawl and mine this copy of the article, but in
> general would not have any further rights, such as the right to
redistribute
> or make derivative works.
>
> Open access grants all of the rights inherrent to free access, but the
> copyright holders grant (by signing some form of license) all users
> additional rights, especially the right to redistribute and make
derivative
> works, in general asking only that the original work be properly cited.
(The
> different definitions of open access are not identical, but all
essentially
> say this).
>
> I hope we can agree that these are not equivalent, so that we can get onto
> the more important question, which is is this a meaningful difference -
that
> is, are the additional rights given to users under open access meaningful,
> and does granting them benefit authors, readers and the research community
> in general. Obviously, you think the answer is no, while I think it is
yes.
>
> I address your 6 points below, although I think that you are conflating
two
> different points.
>
> 1) Open access is unnecessary - everything that a user would want to do
with
> a paper they can do with free access.
> 2) Open access is an obstacle to free access - demanding that publishers
> provide open access delays or obstructs their providing free access.
>
> I hope my answers below address why I think these are both incorrect.
>
> > So here is my list, again:
> >
> > (1) UBIQUITOUS DIRECT ONLINE ACCESS MAKES DERIVATIVE ACCESS SUPERFLUOUS:
> > Once the full-text is immediately, permanently, and ubiquitously
> > (i.e., webwide) accessible toll-free, so any user anywhere, any time,
> > can read the full-text on-screen, download it, store it, print it off,
> > search/grep it, computationally process it, etc. -- which any user can
> > do if the author self-archives it -- the further rights and uses that
> > distinguish "free" from "open" become either moot or supererogatory:
> >
>
> If all you are concerned about is getting toll free access to pa

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Michael Eisen]

le to have universal free access
through self-archiving AND to support journals through subscriptions.
Self-archiving is, almost by definition, parasitic (and I say that in a good
way!). And, like most parasites, the host has to be healthy for it to
survive. If we imagine that all works are suddenly self-archived, who is
going to subscribe to journals? I just don't see how self-archiving can
provide universal free access without killing off toll-access journals in
the process (do you really think selling print subscriptions will sustain
them?). I feel that living under and promulgating the illusion that
self-archiving and toll-access journals are mutually compatible does not
hasten universal access, it delays it because it delays us facing up to the
reality that we need a new economic model for scientific publishing.

>
> (6) SELF-ARCHIVED FULL-TEXTS CAN BE COMPUTATIONALLY DATA-MINED: Research
> articles are not themselves research data (though they may contain
> some research data), but they can be treated as computational data if
> they are accessible toll-free online. Again, there is no need for any
> further rights or computational capabilities to do be able to do this:
> The full-text need merely be immediately, permanently, and ubiquitously
> (i.e., webwide) accessible toll-free, so any user anywhere, any time,
> can read the full-text on-screen, download it, store it, print it off,
> search/grep it, computationally process it, etc.

While there is a lot that can/could be done with self-archived free-access
works, the inability to serve up cached, or more importantly, digested and
reprocessed versions of works greatly and needlessly limits the types of
computational analysis and data-mining that can be done on the literature.
If all you want to do is search, then self-archiving is ok (although still
subotimal), but for any more sophisticated analyses it is not.



- Original Message -
From: "Stevan Harnad" 
To: 
Sent: Tuesday, December 30, 2003 7:45 AM
Subject: Re: Free Access vs. Open Access


> ~On Mon, 29 Dec 2003, Michael Eisen wrote:
>
> >sh> Perhaps all Sally means here is that she thinks it would be more
useful
> >sh> if open-access ("gold") journals did not use the creative-commons
> >sh> license, and instead, apart from providing immediate, permanent,
> >sh> toll-free, non-gerrymandered, online access to the full-text, the
journal
> >sh> required *exclusive* copyright transfer for its sale in derivative
works.
> > >
> >sh> I'd say: No harm in that; go ahead! There was never any need for the
> >sh> creative-commons license here anyway! Open-access provision was all
that was
> >sh> needed -- whether via the golden road or the green one.
> > >
> >sh> (But again, what market is there likely to be for derivative works
when the
> >sh> full-text is forever freely available online?)
> >
> > I couldn't disagree more. You are redefining open access to be no more
than
> > free access. For many of us involved in open access the ability to reuse
and
> > republish text is a critical part of making optimal use of the
scientific
> > literature. PLoS chose the creative commons license in order to
encourage
> > creative reuse of the content we publish.
>
> Mike,
>
> In this discussion thread
>
> "Free Access Vs. Open Access"
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2956.html
>
> I have several times laid out in some detail the reasons I believe the
> distinction between "free access" and "open access" is not only vacuous,
> but is now even becoming an obstacle to the understanding and growth of
> free/open access itself.
>
> I will again summarize the points, but please, by way of reply, do not
> just reinvoke the distinction, as if it were valid and unchallenged,
> but rather defend it against the 6 points I make, if it can be defended.
>
> I hasten to add that it is not a defence to say that the free/open
> distinction is enshrined in the wording of the Budapest Open Access
> Initiative that we both had a hand in drafting and that we both signed:
> I considered the distinction just as empty then as I do now, but then I
> thought it was harmless, like adding "for the candidate of your choice" to
> the demand for voting rights. I would never have thought that anyone would
> call it not "true" voting rights or less than "full" voting rights if
> you got to vote, but the candidate of your choice was not on the ballot!
>
> Here is the BOAI definition:
>
> What does BOAI mean by "open access"?
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess
>
> "By 'open access' to this

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

~On Mon, 29 Dec 2003, Michael Eisen wrote:

>sh> Perhaps all Sally means here is that she thinks it would be more useful
>sh> if open-access ("gold") journals did not use the creative-commons
>sh> license, and instead, apart from providing immediate, permanent,
>sh> toll-free, non-gerrymandered, online access to the full-text, the journal
>sh> required *exclusive* copyright transfer for its sale in derivative works.
> >
>sh> I'd say: No harm in that; go ahead! There was never any need for the
>sh> creative-commons license here anyway! Open-access provision was all that 
>was
>sh> needed -- whether via the golden road or the green one.
> >
>sh> (But again, what market is there likely to be for derivative works when the
>sh> full-text is forever freely available online?)
>
> I couldn't disagree more. You are redefining open access to be no more than
> free access. For many of us involved in open access the ability to reuse and
> republish text is a critical part of making optimal use of the scientific
> literature. PLoS chose the creative commons license in order to encourage
> creative reuse of the content we publish.

Mike,

In this discussion thread

"Free Access Vs. Open Access"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2956.html

I have several times laid out in some detail the reasons I believe the
distinction between "free access" and "open access" is not only vacuous,
but is now even becoming an obstacle to the understanding and growth of
free/open access itself.

I will again summarize the points, but please, by way of reply, do not
just reinvoke the distinction, as if it were valid and unchallenged,
but rather defend it against the 6 points I make, if it can be defended.

I hasten to add that it is not a defence to say that the free/open
distinction is enshrined in the wording of the Budapest Open Access
Initiative that we both had a hand in drafting and that we both signed:
I considered the distinction just as empty then as I do now, but then I
thought it was harmless -- like adding "for the candidate of your choice"
to the demand for voting rights. I would never have thought that anyone
would call it not "true" voting rights or less than "full" voting rights
if you *got* to vote, but the candidate of your choice was not on the
ballot (because he wasn't running)!

Here is the BOAI definition:

What does BOAI mean by "open access"?
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess

"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."

So here is my list, again:

(1) UBIQUITOUS DIRECT ONLINE ACCESS MAKES DERIVATIVE ACCESS SUPERFLUOUS:
Once the full-text is immediately, permanently, and ubiquitously
(i.e., webwide) accessible toll-free, so any user anywhere, any time,
can read the full-text on-screen, download it, store it, print it off,
search/grep it, computationally process it, etc. -- which any user can
do if the author self-archives it -- the further rights and uses that
distinguish "free" from "open" become either moot or supererogatory:

(2) NO EXTRA DOWNLOAD/PRINT RIGHTS NEEDED, OR NEED BE SPECIFIED: Users
don't need a further specified right to download, store, process or
print-off any of the other material that they can download, store and
print-off from the web -- as long as the material is itself not pirated
by another consumer, but provided by its own author, as is the case with
one's own self-archived journal articles.

(3) NO NEED OR RIGHT TO RE-PUBLISH: There is no need or justification
for demanding the further right to re-publish a full-text in further
*print-on-paper* publications ("derivative works") when it is already
ubiquitously accessible toll-free online. That was never part of the
rationale or justification for demanding free/open access in the first
place. What ushered in the open-access era was the newborn possibility
of providing all would-be users with free, ubiquitous *online* access
to texts, thereby maximizing their useability and research impact. This
newfound possibility, created by the Web, had nothing whatsoever to do
with the right to re-publish those texts

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Michael Eisen]

Stevan-

I couldn't disagree more. You are redefining open access to be no more than
free access. For many of us involved in open access the ability to reuse and
republish text is a critical part of making optimal use of the scientific
literature. PLoS chose the creative commons license in order to encourage
creative reuse of the content we publish.

You may not see the value in allowing redistribution, derivative works and
other forms of reuse, but you have to recognize that others do and that this
is an central part of the definition of open access. And you shouldn't be
encouraging this kind of confusion of open access and free access. If all
you care about is free access, then lobby for that, but don't dilute the
meaning of open access.

-Mike

- Original Message -
From: "Stevan Harnad" 
To: 
Sent: Monday, December 29, 2003 5:23 PM
Subject: Re: Free Access vs. Open Access


> Perhaps all Sally means here is that she thinks it would be more useful
> if open-access ("gold") journals did not use the creative-commons
> license, and instead, apart from providing immediate, permanent,
> toll-free, non-gerrymandered, online access to the full-text, the journal
> required *exclusive* copyright transfer for its sale in derivative works.
>
> I'd say: No harm in that; go ahead! There was never any need for the
> creative-commons license here anyway! Open-access provision was all that
was
> needed -- whether via the golden road or the green one.
>
> (But again, what market is there likely to be for derivative works when
the
> full-text is forever freely available online?)
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
> > On Mon, 29 Dec 2003, Sally Morris wrote:
> >
> >sm> I think it is perfectly reasonable (and in no way a denial of Open
Access)
> >sm> for a publisher to wish to retain the right to sell derivative copies
of a
> >sm> work, even if in its original form it is made freely available.
> >
> > This is indeed perfectly reasonable and correct, and in no way a denial
> > of Open Access.
> >
> > (But if the original form of a work is freely available online, it is
> > not clear what market there would be for derivative copies...)
> >
> >sm> After all, they've got to recover their costs somehow - and if they
> >sm> recover more from other sources, they will not need to ask authors to
> >sm> pay so much.
> >
> > This sentence is far less clear than the prior one, and appears to be
conflating
> > the case where open-access to the work is being provided by
self-archiving
> > an article that has been published in a toll-access ("green") journal
with
> > the case where open-access to the woork is being provided by publishing
> > it in an open-access ("gold") journal.
> >
> > If the sentence referred to self-archiving green journal articles,
> > then the authors are not paying anything (the green journals are still
> > charging access tolls).
> >
> > If the sentence was referring to publishing articles in gold
(open-access)
> > journals, then author/institution publication fees are paying the costs.
> >
> > There might conceivably be additional revenue to be made from
> > selling derivative works, which could then lower the gold journal's
> > author/institution fees, but (as noted) who would want to pay for
> > derivative works if the full-text was already available free for all
> > online?
> >
> > Many gold journals are using or planning to use the "creative commons"
> > license, which (as I understand it) allows anyone to publish derivative
> > works from the open-access work. That would of course include its gold
publisher
> > too. So no further right needs to be retained by the gold publisher in
that
> > case.
> >
> > Stevan Harnad
> >
> > NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
> > access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at
> > the American Scientist Open Access Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02 & 03):
> > 
> > http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
> > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
> > Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org
> >
> > Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
> > BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
> > journal whenever one exists.
> > http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
> > BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
> > toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
> > http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
> > http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
> > http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
> >
>

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

Perhaps all Sally means here is that she thinks it would be more useful
if open-access ("gold") journals did not use the creative-commons
license, and instead, apart from providing immediate, permanent,
toll-free, non-gerrymandered, online access to the full-text, the journal
required *exclusive* copyright transfer for its sale in derivative works.

I'd say: No harm in that; go ahead! There was never any need for the
creative-commons license here anyway! Open-access provision was all that was
needed -- whether via the golden road or the green one.

(But again, what market is there likely to be for derivative works when the
full-text is forever freely available online?)

Stevan Harnad

> On Mon, 29 Dec 2003, Sally Morris wrote:
>
>sm> I think it is perfectly reasonable (and in no way a denial of Open Access)
>sm> for a publisher to wish to retain the right to sell derivative copies of a
>sm> work, even if in its original form it is made freely available.
>
> This is indeed perfectly reasonable and correct, and in no way a denial
> of Open Access.
>
> (But if the original form of a work is freely available online, it is
> not clear what market there would be for derivative copies...)
>
>sm> After all, they've got to recover their costs somehow - and if they
>sm> recover more from other sources, they will not need to ask authors to
>sm> pay so much.
>
> This sentence is far less clear than the prior one, and appears to be 
> conflating
> the case where open-access to the work is being provided by self-archiving
> an article that has been published in a toll-access ("green") journal with
> the case where open-access to the woork is being provided by publishing
> it in an open-access ("gold") journal.
>
> If the sentence referred to self-archiving green journal articles,
> then the authors are not paying anything (the green journals are still
> charging access tolls).
>
> If the sentence was referring to publishing articles in gold (open-access)
> journals, then author/institution publication fees are paying the costs.
>
> There might conceivably be additional revenue to be made from
> selling derivative works, which could then lower the gold journal's
> author/institution fees, but (as noted) who would want to pay for
> derivative works if the full-text was already available free for all
> online?
>
> Many gold journals are using or planning to use the "creative commons"
> license, which (as I understand it) allows anyone to publish derivative
> works from the open-access work. That would of course include its gold 
> publisher
> too. So no further right needs to be retained by the gold publisher in that
> case.
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
> NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
> access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at
> the American Scientist Open Access Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02 & 03):
> 
> http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
> Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org
>
> Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
> BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
> journal whenever one exists.
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
> BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
> toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
> http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
> http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
> http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
>

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

On Mon, 29 Dec 2003, Sally Morris wrote:

> I think it is perfectly reasonable (and in no way a denial of Open Access)
> for a publisher to wish to retain the right to sell derivative copies of a
> work, even if in its original form it is made freely available.

This is indeed perfectly reasonable and correct, and in no way a denial
of Open Access.

(But if the original form of a work is freely available online, it is
not clear what market there would be for derivative copies...)

> After all, they've got to recover their costs somehow - and if they
> recover more from other sources, they will not need to ask authors to
> pay so much.

This sentence is far less clear than the prior one, and appears to be conflating
the case where open-access to the work is being provided by self-archiving
an article that has been published in a toll-access ("green") journal with
the case where open-access to the woork is being provided by publishing
it in an open-access ("gold") journal.

If the sentence referred to self-archiving green journal articles,
then the authors are not paying anything (the green journals are still
charging access tolls).

If the sentence was referring to publishing articles in gold (open-access)
journals, then author/institution publication fees are paying the costs.

There might conceivably be additional revenue to be made from
selling derivative works, which could then lower the gold journal's
author/institution fees, but (as noted) who would want to pay for
derivative works if the full-text was already available free for all
online?

Many gold journals are using or planning to use the "creative commons"
license, which (as I understand it) allows anyone to publish derivative
works from the open-access work. That would of course include its gold publisher
too. So no further right needs to be retained by the gold publisher in that
case.

Stevan Harnad

NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at
the American Scientist Open Access Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02 & 03):

http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org

Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
journal whenever one exists.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Sally Morris]

Sorry for belated response

I think it is perfectly reasonable (and in no way a denial of Open Access)
for a publisher to wish to retain the right to sell derivative copies of a
work, even if in its original form it is made freely available.  After all,
they've got to recover their costs somehow - and if they recover more from
other sources, they will not need to ask authors to pay so much.

Sally


NOTE NEW EMAIL ADDRESS - PLEASE UPDATE YOUR RECORDS.   THANKS!

Sally Morris, Chief Executive
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK

Phone:  +44 (0)1903 871686 Fax:  +44 (0)1903 871457
E-mail:  chief-e...@alpsp.org
ALPSP Website  http://www.alpsp.org

Our journal, Learned Publishing, is included in the
ALPSP Learned Journals Collection, www.alpsp-collection.org


- Original Message -
From: "Lars Aronsson" 
To: 
Sent: Monday, December 15, 2003 11:35 AM
Subject: Re: Free Access vs. Open Access


> Stevan Harnad wrote:
> > And what is meant by "redistribute" when the text is already distributed
> > all over the planet on the web, and freely available to anyone who may
> > wish to find, search, read, download, process computationally online or
> > offline, and print off anywhere in the world, any time?
>
> This sounds like the beginning of the free-as-beer or free-as-speech
> discussion from the GNU project all over again,
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
>
> Redistribute means the permission to copy the article and republish it
> on another website or on another medium.  Some say that this right is
> necessary to assure that the contents will be permanently available,
> because you cannot trust any one institution to be around for ever.
> Most eloquently put, "Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload
> their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror
> it." (http://quote.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds)  The crucial
> question is then: Do you allow the world to mirror it?
>
> The conference paper that I have on http://aronsson.se/wikipaper.html
> is available for all to read free of charge, but you cannot
> copy-and-republish because I own the copyright, and I don't allow free
> copying and redistribution.  If I find that you store a copy of it on
> your openly available website, I will ask you to take it down.
>
> But free software such as Linux is free to download, republish at your
> own website, sell on CDROM or redistribute in *almost* any way.  This
> is not to say that it is in the public domain, which it is not.  It is
> owned by its creators and licensed to you under the conditions set
> forth in the GNU General Public License.
>
>
> --
>   Lars Aronsson (l...@aronsson.se)
>   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

I think Jan Velterop might have misinterpreted the content of the "Free
Access vs. Open Access" thread. This thread is not in fact opposing two
rival forms of access. It is questioning the coherence and content of
the open vs. free access distinction itself.

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, Jan Velterop wrote:

> It would be helpful if self-archiving enthusiasts would see and present
> self-archiving as an important step towards achieving open access at the
> root of scholarly communication, by eventually having all peer-reviewed
> research articles published with full open access from the outset.

I'm afraid that the incorrect and misleading distinction between "full"
and "non-full" open access (just as spurious as the distinction between
"free access" and "open access," and the counterproductive implication
that "open access" equals "open access publishing") permeates the very
premise of Jan's suggestion here.

The promotors of open-access provision through author/institution self-archiving
of their toll-access articles are promoting *open access*, not "an important 
step
toward achieving open access." Open access. Toll-free, immediate, permanent
online access to the full-texts of all those articles. Open access.

Yes, I too believe that the eventual outcome of all this is likely to
be all journals becoming open access journals.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm

But I know (not "believe": "know") that we first have to get there from here.
And I also know (because it has been successfully demonstrated already,
with hundreds of thousands of articles) that open access can be provided
*right now* to as many of the 2,500,000 annual articles in the 24,000
existing peer-reviewed journals as we choose to provide it for. I am not
a "self-archiving enthusiast" but an open-access enthusiast who has seen
that self-archiving is the fastest and surest road to open access today.

It is also a road ("green") that is still vastly underutilized. The
"golden" road is underutilized too, but not nearly as underutilized,
proportionately, as the green road, because the green road can already
today bear virtually 100% of the traffic -- if only the research community
can be persuaded to take make use of it!

I have been writing articles and postings for years about what the likely
sequel to universal open-access provision via self-archiving will be: a
universal transition to open-access journal publishing (an economic model
I described and have been advocating for years as the stable "end-game"
of open-access provision). But that eventual outcome is hypothetical,
and the endgame is nowhere in sight, whereas the feasibility and benefits
of immediate open-access provision through self-archiving are demonstrated
and certain.

So, far more useful than confusing authors who are neither publishing in
open access journals today nor self-archiving today -- by presenting
open-access self-archiving to them as a step toward open-access
journal-publishing -- is presenting open-access self-archiving to them
as the immediate open-access provision that it really is: done, not
for the sake of eventual open-access publishing, but for the sake of
immediate open access to their own work, today. Open access. That is what
it is all about, and for. Not possible eventual transition to universal
open-access publishing (even though I, like you, believe that that is
where it indeed leads).

Besides, what I always present is the unified dual open-access provision
strategy. (Does BMC always present this unified dual open-access provision
strategy too?):

  "(1) Publish your article in an OA journal if a suitable one exists,
  (2) otherwise publish your article in a suitable TA journal and also
  self-archive it."

That rightly presents OA journal-publishing and OA self-archiving as
complementary means to the same end: open access. It would not help to
misrepresent OA self-archiving as instead being merely a means to OA
journal publishing as the end! OA does not equal OA journal-publishing.

> It is fully acknowledged that publishing new open access journals is not 
> likely to
> change science publishing overnight (although the momentum is growing fast),

This is not about changing science publishing, it is about providing
open access (preferably overnight!).

How fast is open access journal momentum (gold) growing in terms of
articles, relative to the total number of annual articles in journals
(2,500,000 in 24,000)? And how fast relative to the rate at which
open-access through self-archiving (green) is growing? Those are the
figures needed to make a rational strategic judgment here!

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0024.gif
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Jan Velterop]

It would be helpful if self-archiving enthusiasts would see and present
self-archiving as an important step towards achieving open access at the
root of scholarly communication, by eventually having all peer-reviewed
research articles published with full open access from the outset. It is
fully acknowledged that publishing new open access journals is not likely to
change science publishing overnight (although the momentum is growing fast),
and self-archiving can potentially be a very important and effective
catalyst. For that, focus needs to be on commonalities rather than on
differences. To describe self-archiving and open access publishing as
somehow opposite solutions to the debilitating effects of toll-access to
both the optimal dissemination of research results and the (related) budget
crises in libraries, is not doing the movement any good. It should not be
"free VERSUS open", but "free AND open" or at the very least "free AS A MOVE
TOWARDS open".

Jan

> -Original Message-
> From: Stevan Harnad [mailto:har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk]
> Sent: 15 December 2003 03:23
> To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org
> Subject: Re: Free Access vs. Open Access
>
>
> I've changed the subject thread because the focus seems to
> have returned to
> the free vs open access distinction, which I will argue is
> both spurious and
> a retardant on progress toward free/open access.
>
> The point is extremely simple. According to Mike Eisen, my definition
> of open access as
> FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE
> FULL-TEXTS ONLINE
> supposedly misses three things:
>
> (1) "right to reuse"
> (2) "right to redistribute"
> (3) "licensed with the Creative Commons Attribution License"
>  (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/).
>
> What is meant by "reuse" that being able to freely find, search, read,
> download, process computationally online or offline, store, and print
> off -- anywhere in the world, any time -- does not already
> cover? For that
> is what FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE
> FULL-TEXTS
> ONLINE means. That is what we can do with any freely
> accessible text on
> the web.
>
> And what is meant by "redistribute" when the text is already
> distributed
> all over the planet on the web, and freely available to anyone who may
> wish to find, search, read, download, process computationally
> online or
> offline, and print off anywhere in the world, any time?
>
> Could this "reuse" and "redistribute" right perhaps be a spurious
> holdover from another medium -- the Gutenberg medium,
> print-on-paper --
> where "re-use" of a printed text meant re-use in *another*
> printed text
> (i.e., republication), and "redistribution" meant the distribution of
> that other printed text? But why on earth would anyone want to bother
> doing that in the PostGutenberg era, when *everyone* already
> has access
> to the text, and each can print it off directly for himself?
>
> Collected works? That's just a list of URLs in the PostGutenberg era.
>
> And that's where it stops. My text is not like data or software, to be
> modified, built upon, and then redistributed (perhaps as your
> own). You
> may use its content, but you may not alter it and then distribute
> the altered version, online or on-paper.
>
> But that protection from text-corruption -- along with protection from
> plagiarism or nonattribution -- is already inherent in conventional
> copyright, whether the author retains copyright or assigns it to the
> publisher. So a no new Creative Commons License is needed either. Just
> ordinary copyright assertion (whether retained or assigned) -- plus
> open (sic) access provision through self-archiving. (The publisher's
> blessing on the self-archiving is welcome, but not necessary either:
> http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#copyright1 ).
>
> Now some comments:
>
> On Sun, 14 Dec 2003, Michael Eisen wrote:
>
> > Your definition of open access
> >
> >sh> "OA means
> >sh> FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE
> FULL-TEXTS ONLINE"
> >
> > leaves out a crucial component - namely the rights of reuse and
> > redistribution. This is clearly spelled out in the BOAI definition:
> >
> >   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 soft

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, Lars Aronsson wrote:

> Stevan Harnad wrote:
>sh> And what is meant by "redistribute" when the text is already distributed
>sh> all over the planet on the web, and freely available to anyone who may
>sh> wish to find, search, read, download, process computationally online or
>sh> offline, and print off anywhere in the world, any time?
>
> This sounds like the beginning of the free-as-beer or free-as-speech
> discussion from the GNU project all over again,
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Please see this prior item on this same Amsci subject-thread:

"On the Deep Disanalogy Between Text and Software and
Between Text and Data Insofar as Free/Open Access is Concerned"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2967.html

Here is am excerpt:

MC: "The open source software community [uses] the shorthand
 'free, as in beer'"

The open/free distinction in software is based on the modifiability
of the code. This is irrelevant to refereed-article full-text. (And
the beer analogy was silly and uninformative in both cases! Lots of
laughs, but little light cast.)

> Redistribute means the permission to copy the article and republish it
> on another website or on another medium.  Some say that this right is
> necessary to assure that the contents will be permanently available,
> because you cannot trust any one institution to be around for ever.

Are we now transmuting the free/open red herring into the preservation
red herring?
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#1.Preservation

> Most eloquently put, "Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload
> their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror
> it." (http://quote.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds)  The crucial
> question is then: Do you allow the world to mirror it?

Short answer: While the canonical version of the toll-access journal
literature is being bought and sold via access-tolls to institutional
subscribers/licensees, the preservation burden is *entirely* in the
hands of the toll-access providers and clients (i.e., publishers and
libraries). The self-archived version is merely a secondary supplement,
to provide open access for those whose institutions cannot afford the
primary toll-access version. It is not a substitute for the toll-access
version. It hence has no primary preservation burden (yet it has been
successfully surviving since at least 1991, thank you very much).

The analogy between free/open software and free/open access to the
refereed journal literature is a disanalogy and a misleading distraction.

> The conference paper that I have on http://aronsson.se/wikipaper.html
> is available for all to read free of charge, but you cannot
> copy-and-republish because I own the copyright, and I don't allow free
> copying and redistribution.  If I find that you store a copy of it on
> your openly available website, I will ask you to take it down.

Why would I store a paper on my own website that is freely and permanently
available on another website? If I need to use it, I download and use it
from your website. If I need to refer to it, I cite it and link the URL.

On the permanence and preservation of *your* website, see above. We are
talking about secondary access-provision (to published articles)
through self-archiving here, not about self-publication:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.4

About hypothetical future transitions in which the archiving/access/preservation
burden of the primary corpus is off-loaded onto the secondary corpus: Let's
talk about crossing that bridge if and when it looks as if it's coming close.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm

Till then what is needed isn't worries about preserving this still secondary
(and sparse) corpus, but positive measures to hasten its growth.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0022.gif

> But free software such as Linux is free to download, republish at your
> own website, sell on CDROM or redistribute in *almost* any way.  This
> is not to say that it is in the public domain, which it is not.  It is
> owned by its creators and licensed to you under the conditions set
> forth in the GNU General Public License.

Irrelevant to the open access movement's goal of attaining toll-free
full-text access online to the 2,500,000 annual articles in the 24,000
peer-reviewed journals for those of its would-be users whose institutions
cannot afford the tolls to access the journal's proprietary canonical
version.

No need to "republish" anything. All that's needed is:
FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE FULL-TEXTS ONLINE.
That's what the author's self-archived version -- in his own institution's
open-access archive for its own research output -- is intended to provide.
And that is what open-access provisi

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Lars Aronsson]

Stevan Harnad wrote:
> And what is meant by "redistribute" when the text is already distributed
> all over the planet on the web, and freely available to anyone who may
> wish to find, search, read, download, process computationally online or
> offline, and print off anywhere in the world, any time?

This sounds like the beginning of the free-as-beer or free-as-speech
discussion from the GNU project all over again,
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Redistribute means the permission to copy the article and republish it
on another website or on another medium.  Some say that this right is
necessary to assure that the contents will be permanently available,
because you cannot trust any one institution to be around for ever.
Most eloquently put, "Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload
their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror
it." (http://quote.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds)  The crucial
question is then: Do you allow the world to mirror it?

The conference paper that I have on http://aronsson.se/wikipaper.html
is available for all to read free of charge, but you cannot
copy-and-republish because I own the copyright, and I don't allow free
copying and redistribution.  If I find that you store a copy of it on
your openly available website, I will ask you to take it down.

But free software such as Linux is free to download, republish at your
own website, sell on CDROM or redistribute in *almost* any way.  This
is not to say that it is in the public domain, which it is not.  It is
owned by its creators and licensed to you under the conditions set
forth in the GNU General Public License.


--
  Lars Aronsson (l...@aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

I've changed the subject thread because the focus seems to have returned to
the free vs open access distinction, which I will argue is both spurious and
a retardant on progress toward free/open access.

The point is extremely simple. According to Mike Eisen, my definition
of open access as
FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE FULL-TEXTS ONLINE
supposedly misses three things:

(1) "right to reuse"
(2) "right to redistribute"
(3) "licensed with the Creative Commons Attribution License"
 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/).

What is meant by "reuse" that being able to freely find, search, read,
download, process computationally online or offline, store, and print
off -- anywhere in the world, any time -- does not already cover? For that
is what FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE FULL-TEXTS
ONLINE means. That is what we can do with any freely accessible text on
the web.

And what is meant by "redistribute" when the text is already distributed
all over the planet on the web, and freely available to anyone who may
wish to find, search, read, download, process computationally online or
offline, and print off anywhere in the world, any time?

Could this "reuse" and "redistribute" right perhaps be a spurious
holdover from another medium -- the Gutenberg medium, print-on-paper --
where "re-use" of a printed text meant re-use in *another* printed text
(i.e., republication), and "redistribution" meant the distribution of
that other printed text? But why on earth would anyone want to bother
doing that in the PostGutenberg era, when *everyone* already has access
to the text, and each can print it off directly for himself?

Collected works? That's just a list of URLs in the PostGutenberg era.

And that's where it stops. My text is not like data or software, to be
modified, built upon, and then redistributed (perhaps as your own). You
may use its content, but you may not alter it and then distribute
the altered version, online or on-paper.

But that protection from text-corruption -- along with protection from
plagiarism or nonattribution -- is already inherent in conventional
copyright, whether the author retains copyright or assigns it to the
publisher. So a no new Creative Commons License is needed either. Just
ordinary copyright assertion (whether retained or assigned) -- plus
open (sic) access provision through self-archiving. (The publisher's
blessing on the self-archiving is welcome, but not necessary either:
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#copyright1 ).

Now some comments:

On Sun, 14 Dec 2003, Michael Eisen wrote:

> Your definition of open access
>
>sh> "OA means
>sh> FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE FULL-TEXTS ONLINE"
>
> leaves out a crucial component - namely the rights of reuse and
> redistribution. This is clearly spelled out in the BOAI definition:
>
>   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."
>   http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess

As I said, the reuse and redistribution capability is already inherent in
the free online access to the full text. The BOAI definition -- which I
signed on to, just as you did -- spells out these redundant capabilities
in order to make explicit all the benefits inherent in toll-free online
full-text access.

(I do agree that gerrymandered "ebrary"-style http://www.ebrary.com/
access -- in which software tricks see to it that you can only view the
text onscreen and cannot download, store, print or process it -- would
not be open access. But such tricks are irrelevant here, as self-archiving
is something that authors do for themselves, and they are not interested
in imposing ebrary-style restrictions on the usage of their work: It's
for the sake of freeing their work -- and hence its potential uptake,
usage and impact -- from such restrictions that they are providing the
open-access version in the first place!)

>sh> I think it is Mike's spurious free/open distinction that allows him to
>sh> fail to make [the] absolutely fundamental distinction between the two
>sh> complementary components of the unified OA strategy [OA provision through
>sh> OA journal-publishing vs. OA provision through OA self-archiving of TA
>sh> articles]
>
> You may think this is free/open distinction is spurious, but in doing s

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Michael Eisen]

ion that results from them).
>
> In what follows,
>
> OA = Open Access
>
> TA = Toll Access
>
> and OA means:
>
> FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE FULL-TEXTS
ONLINE
>
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3223.html
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess
>
> In approximate numbers, we are taking about how to provide OA, in the
above sense,
> to the yearly 2,500,000 articles that appear in the planet's 24,000
peer-reviewed
> journals (across all disciplines and languages).
>
> Before I proceed to a point-by-point commentary on Mike's posting, I will
> reproduce it in full. But before that I will provide a succinct summary
> of my reply. Here it is:
>
> There is only one, unified OA provision strategy: "Publish your
> article in an OA journal if a suitable one exists, otherwise
> publish your article in a suitable TA journal and also self-archive
> it." There is no competition between these two components; they
> are complementary. The discussion below is only about what is
> the immediate scope for each component today. All are agreed that both
> components are underutilized. The only disagreement is about *how
> much* each component is underutilized. The disagreement would
> be immediately mooted if the advocates of each component always
> explicitly advocated their own component as only one part of the
> unified OA provision strategy: "Publish your article in an OA journal
> if a suitable one exists otherwise publish your article in a suitable
> TA journal and also self-archive it."
>
> First, here is Mike's comment in full:
>
> On Thu, 11 Dec 2003, Michael Eisen wrote:
>
> > I think Sally is absolutely correct that less than 2.5% of published
content
> > is published in open access journals, but that doesn't count the large
> > amount of material that is made freely available by fee-for-access
> > publishers through their own websites or through PubMed Central. I, of
> > course, don't count this later class as being truly open access, but it
is
> > as available as self-archived content and should be given its proper
due.
> >
> > I would also like to object, once again, to Stevan's continued use of
this
> > 5% open access / 95% self-archiving number. It's grossly unfair to
contrast
> > reality (<5% of articles currently published in open access journals) on
> > one side with potential (that 95% - or more accurately something like
50% -
> > of articles COULD be self-archived). With BMC's diverse collection of
> > journals, PLoS, and the many other open-access publishers in DOAJ
(including
> > high-end journals like PLoS Biology, J. Biol, JCI, BMJ) virtually any
> > biomedical research article could be published in an open-access journal
> > today.
> >
> > Thus, most authors - many, many more than the 5% you imply - who want to
> > make their work freely available have a choice - they can publish it in
a
> > "green" fee-for-access journal and self-archive it, or they can publish
in
> > an open access "gold" journal. They may have reasons to choose the
former
> > route, and there is certainly a lot of work that needs to be done to
make
> > open access journals more appealing, but let's stop implying that the
open
> > access journal option wasn't available.
>
> I now reply point by point:
>
> > I think Sally is absolutely correct that less than 2.5% of published
content
> > is published in open access journals, but that doesn't count the large
> > amount of material that is made freely available by fee-for-access
> > publishers through their own websites or through PubMed Central. I, of
> > course, don't count this latter class as being truly open access, but it
is
> > as available as self-archived content and should be given its proper
due.
>
> I completely agree with Mike that all freely-accessible full-text journal
> articles should be counted, but I don't think it is giving them their
> proper due to decline to count them as "truly" OA! Unless, of course,
> they fail to meet the full OA definition:
>
> FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE FULL-TEXTS
ONLINE
>
> "Is there any need for a universal Open Access label?"
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3223.html
>
> They could fail to meet that definition not only by failing to be free, or
> failing to be refereed journal articles, or failing to be full-texts
online.
> They could also fail by not being immediate or by not bein

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Jan Velterop wrote:

> Our advice to authors should be:
>
> 1. Publish in open access journals when possible;
>
> 2. If not possible, self-archive in OAI-compliant repositories in a
> machine-readable format (such as XML);
>
> 3. Should that not be possible either, self-archive in other formats (such
> as pdf).
>
> However, in *any* case, make sure your articles are freely and publicly
> available!

That's exactly the right advice, in exactly the right order. However:

(1) It is an undeniable fact that option 1 is open to very few of the
yearly 2,500,000 papers published today (because the open-access --
"golden" -- journals are far too few: >>5%).

(2) Option 2 will be open only
to the papers in some of the Romeo "green" journals (those that allow
the self-archiving of the publisher's XML) plus the still infinitesmal
(though growing) number of authors who write their papers in XML.

(3) So the overwhelming majority of papers today will only have option 1
(which includes PDF, HTML, TeX, etc.).

If they *do* all do that, however, my own work in this domain will be
done and I will return to the ranks of the creators and users of this
literature (and your message box will have fewer and shorter emails!).

But your 3-pronged advice is right, and I hope you will be giving it to all
authors!

Cheers, Stevan

NOTE: Complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at
the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02 & 03):

http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
Posted discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org

Dual Open-Access Strategy:
BOAI-2: Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal
whenever one exists.
BOAI-1: Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access
journal and also self-archive it.
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Jan Velterop]

Sorry, Stevan, your response is too long to read fully.

This is the 'offending' sentence: "...being able to do *everything* one
could do with paper..." That's simply not enough. 'Opening the curtains' is
fine if you want to shed light, but half the time it's night.

Our advice to authors should be:

1. Publish in open access journals when possible;
2. If not possible, self-archive in OAI-compliant repositories in a
machine-readable format (such as XML);
3. Should that not be possible either, self-archive in other formats (such
as pdf).

However, in *any* case, make sure your articles are freely and publicly
available!

Jan

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access
On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Jan Velterop wrote:

> If online material is 'open' in the sense of 'free' that is of course a
> great step forward, but if it's only available in pdf...
> that is decidedly sub-optimal...
> Not being optimal... shouldn't be an excuse for not making freely available
> ...by (self)archiving ...but
> ...we shouldn't lose sight of the ultimate... goal, 'open' access
> (as defined in the Berlin Declaration, the Bethesda principles,
> by Wellcome, PLoS, BioMed Central, and others) as opposed to merely
> 'free' access.
> It doesn't help to be sub-ambitious

I can only repeat that the open/free distinction is a red herring, no
matter how often it is invoked formally and informally.

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2956.html

These matters have not been thought through rigorously; and things
decided in haste have been invoked ever more solemnly without having
been examined for their usefulness or even their coherence.

Please, let's not lose sight of the problem, which is still there,
as pressing as ever, but now being kept at a distance by yet
*another* groundless, confusion-generating, and -- most important --
*inaction-encouraging* reservation.

The problem -- it can never be repeated often enough, apparently -- was
and is this: There are 24,000 journals publishing 2.5 million articles
per year, most of them not accessible to most of their potential users
worldwide because of access-tolls. This was also the problem in the
paper era, but in that medium there was no solution because of the
true costs and limited power of paper. (One could not diffuse paper
over the airways, let alone data-mine it!)

Now we are in the online era, which offers many new possibilities,
including online data-mining. But the *relevant* possibility -- relative
to what we do have, and what we still lack, *exactly* as we lacked it in
the paper era -- is the possibility of toll-free access to the full-text
online. That is what was missing then, and that very same access is
missing now.

So what do we do? We start to talk about this *absent* access as *not
enough*, "sub-optimal," not the "ultimate goal"!

This is rather like declaring (while still sitting in the total darkness):

"Let there be light -- but let it not be just be the good old
sunlight we've been deprived of for centuries, but voice-activated,
computer-controlled, fluorescent/incandescent light, 100K Lux!"

So if someone proposes: "Why don't you just open the curtains and let in
the sunlight?" the reply is "It doesn't help to be sub-ambitious"!

Considering the actual circumstances -- the curtains being still
closed, and most of us still sitting in the dark -- it does seem
rather impractical to be referring to the call to open the curtains
as sub-optimal and sub-ambitious while that simple act is still not
being performed, even though it could be, immediately, because people
still don't understand that it can be, nor what advantages it will
bring. Instead, we get ahead of ourselves, and fixate on the advantages
it will *not* bring!

Yet even those alleged shortfalls are spurious! (See the prior postings
on this thread.) Free online access to the full text (even if only
PDF!) still means being able to do *everything* one could do with paper
(if one could afford the access-tolls!), including reading the printed-off
version! But there is also on-screen browsing, reading and navigation,
downloading, storing, forwarding, *and* the capacity to convert
automatically to html or ascii for text-mining. Free-access online texts
are also harvestable and harvested, invertible and indexable, hence
boolean-searchable and otherwise navigable, singly and collectively. Not
to mention collectible into global virtual archives like oaister, the
google of the refereed research literature.

Data-mining? First, let us not forget that the text of a journal article
usually does not contain the empirical data on which it is based (in
part because it would have been too expensive to publish all those data
on paper in the paper era!), only the summary tables and analyses. So
the empirical data were and still are a separate database -- one that
should likewise be made freely accessible, alongside the refereed article
literature, certainly, but that is a separate matter, not to be conflated
with the open-access movement's first, second and third goal, which is
to free access to the refereed article literature!
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/data-archiving.htm

What quantitative data do appear in the text of an article are just text,
like the rest of the article. Even in XML format, the problems of how
to make generic data interoperable remain to be worked out, so let us
not delay opening the curtains on that account either!

> 'free'

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Jan Velterop]

[Forwarded from a separate discussion thread on the Humanist list
concerning open access to monographs. Redirected here because it
now focusses on the "free vs. open" distinction. -- SH]

If online material is 'open' in the sense of 'free' that is of course a
great step forward, but if it's only available in pdf I'd have to agree with
Gradmann that that is decidedly sub-optimal to say the least, as we have
really moved on with regard to the technical possibilities. Not being
optimal in itself shouldn't be an excuse for not making freely available
what can be made freely available by (self)archiving in open access
repositories, but at the same time we shouldn't lose sight of the ultimate
and patently feasible goal, 'open' access (as defined in the Berlin
Declaration, the Bethesda principles, by Wellcome, PLoS, BioMed Central, and
others) as opposed to merely 'free' access. It doesn't help to be
sub-ambitious; 'free' will come in the wake of the open access movement, but
I doubt if the reverse is true. If one really wants to use literature
efficiently that often involves nowadays electronic tools to analyse,
data-mine, and text-mine the material, for which it has to be in a
machine-readable format.

Open Access really is more than just an economical goal (although it goes
without saying that being able to access literature without having to be at
an institution that can afford the access tolls helps enormously).

Perhaps the difference in approach between open access publishing and
self-archiving, while both working in parallel to strengthen one another, is
the sense of priority of a qualitative (in terms of usability) versus a
quantitative one.

Jan Velterop

> -Original Message-
> From: Stevan Harnad
> Sent: 24 October 2003 18:20
> To: Stefan Gradmann
> Subject: Re: Open Access and Humanities Monographs
>
> On Fri, 24 Oct 2003, Stefan Gradmann wrote:
>
>sg> [Willard,] as you state, the online version of a
>sg> book is not satisfying (and this already has caused the death of the rather
>sg> silly e-book paradigm), and thus self-archiving of book material (even if
>sg> it was available for the authors) may not be a solution at all. Open
>sg> access to electronic information only gets attractive in our context once
>sg> this material is published in a way that is appropriate to the electronic
>sg> environment and that makes use of ist innovative potential in a way
>sg> PDF-documents modeled on the printing analogy simply don't!
>
> I *completely* disagree! Consider the following (I think much more
> realistic) logic:
>
> (1) It is a *good* thing that online access to full-text monographs is
> not as attractive as having the book on paper. That removes one
> prima-facie obstacle to self-archiving them and thereby providing open
> access for those who cannot afford to buy the monograph yet
> might still make some use of the text!
>
> (2) Once open access -- reminder: that means toll-free full-text online
> access for anyone on the web -- becomes widespread for monographs, there
> will be much more motivation for designing ways to make online access
> more convenient, useful, effective.
>
> It makes no sense whatsoever *not* to self-archive a monograph merely
> because online access may not be optimal! It's certainly 100% better
> than no access! (This reasoning is simply the flip-side of the equally
> self-paralytic reasoning that they should not be self-archived because
> they *would* be preferred over the paper version! At least the latter
> would have a publisher, and possibly a royalty-seeking author to endorse
> the reasoning; but with the online-is-nonoptimal argument it is purely
> a rationalization for inaction! No losers; no winners.)
>
> >wm> "Open" is a word like "free", whose meaning and import
> >wm> greatly depends on the preposition that implicitly follows.
> >
>sg> You are perfectly right in pointing out some facets of the connotation aura
>sg> of a term like 'open' (and much more could be said here). I would only like
>sg> to add that the same kind of reflexion could be made regarding the term
>sg> 'access' which may have very different connotative values depending on
>sg> whether you use it with a 'text culture' or with an 'empiristic' background
>sg> ...
>
> It is here that I feel that we non-hermeneuticists and non-semioticians
> may have a bit of an advantage, in not getting too wrapped up in
> far-fetched connotations. Here is a black and white distinction:
>
> (1) 2,500,000 articles in 24,000 journals can only be read
> online if the user's institution can afford to pay the access tolls.
>
> (2) Open access means being able to do the same thing as those lucky
> users, but without having to be at an institution that can afford the
> access tolls.
>
> Open access is not about access to the printed edition. (But
> the online edition can always be printed off, if one wishes.)
>
> No philosophical problem. It is clear what we do not have now, and what
> we would have if the

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

On Wed, 27 Aug 2003, Christopher Warnock wrote:

> The ebrary [http://www.ebrary.com/] controls over the documents 
> range from  very restrictive access models to completely open access 
> models  incorporating any variation of viewing, copying, printing or  
> downloading.

That seems fine, and a welcome entrant to the range of softwares
(Eprints, Dspace, etc.) being offered to universities for
providing open access to their research output:

"EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2670.html

> Any document submitted to ebrary may be  
> downloaded if it is what the publisher desires, we support both  
> protected downloads that provide copyright protection and open  
> downloads that meet your previously stated requirements. 

Universities providing open-access archives for their own refereed
research publications are not themselves publishers: They are merely
providing toll-free access to their own refereed research output,
published in toll-access journals, for all its potential users
worldwide. The only copyright protection they seek is protection against
plagiarism or text-corruption.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.3
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm

> Ebrary does not restrict access to harvesters either, the issue has  
> been that the information that we currently have in our system is  
> copyrighted

Refereed research is copyrighted too. But its authors wish to provide
toll-free access to their to it for all potential users, to maximize
its research impact.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/che.htm

> and having indexers create caches that may then be  
> accessible in HTML contradicts the publisher's desires to protect their  
> author's text and eliminates the copyright protection that has made  
> them willing to make their content accessible online through us at all.  

The authors of refereed research articles wish to make their texts
maximally accessible and maximally usable for all would-be users
worldwide. They do not seek protection from downloads, harvesters,
indexers, etc. They encourage it. The copyright protection that they
do seek (from plagiarism or text-corruption) is unrelated to protection
from downloads, harvesters, indexers, etc.
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/

> With regard to reducing the value of the research and the benefits of  
> unfettered access, what we are trying to do is to enable the  
> information that is copyrighted and made accessible by the publisher to  
> seamlessly interact with the information that is made available by  
> institutions, or individuals-- essentially enabling and facilitating a  
> virtual collaboration between the publisher, the institution and the  
> individual.

In the special case of peer-reviewed research articles (the only
case under discussion here), there is nothing nearly as complicated as
this. The full-text merely needs to be made fully accessible, toll-free,
to all would-be users, worldwide. No need for any particular 3-way
interaction between publisher, institution and individual. The only
thing needed is an institutional OAI-compliant open-access archive
in which to self-archive the research (though links to publishers'
toll-access versions are welcome too!).  
http://www.openarchives.org
http://www.eprints.org

> through documents submitted to our system, each  
> institution may have access to their own collection of their content as  
> well as aggregate their content with other institution's collections.  

OAI-compliance takes care of interoperability of each institution's
refereed research output with other universities' (OAI-compliant)
refereed research output. That is the only content at issue here,
and it has nothing to do with the older concepts of "collection" or
"aggregation."  
http://www.openarchives.org/service/listproviders.html
http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html

> This enables any ebrary enabled database to be integrated with any  
> non-ebrary database and any other ebrary enabled commercial databases  
> of copyrighted information with access levels that are appropriate to  
> the publisher's interests.

Integrating open-access research with toll-access research will
certainly be useful, though the most useful function will be to make
research open-access! OAI-compliance only calls for interoperable
metadata, not necessarily open-access to full-text. Does that not 
already provide the sort of interoperability you are referring to?

> We are in the process of establishing a focus group to help us define  
> the requirements of our software for this community. If you are willing  
> I would appreciate it if you would consider being a part of our focus  
> group.

I'm always ready to provide focused feedback from the standpoint of
the research community's specific need for open access to re

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

On Wed, 27 Aug 2003, Christopher Warnock wrote:

> Stevan,
> 
> I have read your comments with regard to free access vs. open access 
> and I am curious as to your thoughts regarding copyrights and open 
> access and how it relates to ebrary, if at all.
> 
> As a matter of interest/ potential discussion, ebrary has created 
> http://librarycenter.ebrary.com , a resource for librarians and any 
> other interested parties that allows viewing, copying and printing, but 
> not downloading of information. According to your article, this 
> constitutes free access and not open access.
> 
> I would appreciate the opportunity to hear your thoughts on what we are 
> doing.

Dear Chris,

I don't know a great deal about ebrary, but from what I understand from
the site, it seems like a good solution for books and other digital
materials to which the authors and publishers might wish to provide
licensed or even toll-free online full-text access, with certain
restrictions.

My own focus, however, is 100% on refereed research journal articles, and
for those, the restricted ebrary full-text access, if it were toll-free,
would certainly be an improvement over toll-based access. If those were
the only two choices, I would certainly recommend ebrary. But there is
another choice, and that is unrestricted toll-free online access provided
by institutional eprint archives for their own self-archived research
output (peer-reviewed articles, published in toll-access journals,
as well as their precursors, in the form of pre-refereeing preprints
and dissertations).

I notice that ebrary offers institutional repositories for dissertations
and eprints as one possible application of ebrary. But I wonder why
universities would want to restrict the toll-free access to their research
output in such an arbitrary way -- allowing full-text on-screen reading,
copying and printing, but not "downloading" (I'm not sure what that
means, as the text must be downloaded onto the machine that it is being
read on!), and presumably also denying access to automated full-text
indexers and harvesters such as http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/,
http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search and google that can provide
would-be users with still more functionality.

Harnad, S., Varian, H. & Parks, R. (2000) Academic
publishing in the online era: What Will Be For-Fee And
What Will Be For-Free? Culture Machine 2 (Online Journal)
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j002/Articles/art_harn.htm

I cannot imagine why an institution that has come to understand the
benefits of maximizing the usage and impact of its refereed research
output by http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.htm
making its full-text publicly accessible toll-free would want to restrict
the access to it in the above rather arbitrary ways. Such restrictions
would bring no benefit to the institution, and they would continue to
reduce the potential usage and impact of the research, and hence also
reduce the rewards of research impact, in the form or research funding,
productivity, and prestige for the institution. And for no reason at all!
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Ariadne-RAE.htm

So, to summarize: Ebrary seems fine for non-give-away digital materials,
which have not been created purely so that they should be used as widely
and fully as possible. It is also better than toll-based access. But
it is not the optimal solution for refereed research output, which is
indeed created purely so that it should be used as widely and fully as
possible. For this, OAI-interoperability and full-text downloadability,
indexability and harvestability of the kind provided by open-access
self-archiving software such as http://eprints.org seems to provide a far
fuller solution.

Or perhaps ebrary software can be customized so as to switch off the
no-download and no-agent restriction? If so, and if it too generates
OAI-interoperable metadata, then ebrary can be considered as one of the
potential forms of archive-creating software that institutions might
consider using to self-archive their research output (with their choice
of software then boiling down to price and ease of use, among the various
candidate softwares, such as eprints, dspace and ebrary).
See: "EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2670.html

Regarding copyright: Again, for refereed research journal articles in
particular, I think that is already a settled matter: 55% of refereed
journals already formally support author self-archiving, most of the
rest will agree if asked, and for the few who don't, there is a simple,
legal solution that works just as well:
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#copyright1

I hope this answers your question. Do you have any objection to my
posting this reply t

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Christopher Warnock]

Stevan,

Thank you for your reply. You have provided me a valuable insight as to  
how we may be perceived within the academic and library communities.


I would like to possibly clarify some things about ebrary because it  
seems, that in this instance, we are being equated with a capability of  
a specific business model we support within our system and not with the  
functionality of the technology behind the product that enables it.


The primary advantage that ebrary provides our partners and customers  
is flexible control over how documents are distributed, and the  
speed/cost in which the documents may be made available through our  
services over the Internet. The controls over the documents range from  
very restrictive access models to completely open access models  
incorporating any variation of viewing, copying, printing or  
downloading. Ebrary's goal is to provide a flexible and cost-effective  
on-line publishing solution for documents.


That we do not yet have public databases providing examples for  
downloadable files is unfortunate, considering that we do support the  
downloading of files. Any document submitted to ebrary may be  
downloaded if it is what the publisher desires, we support both  
protected downloads that provide copyright protection and open  
downloads that meet your previously stated requirements. Based upon  
your comments we will remedy this, we clearly are not adequately  
demonstrating our capabilities.


Ebrary does not restrict access to harvesters either, the issue has  
been that the information that we currently have in our system is  
copyrighted, and having indexers create caches that may then be  
accessible in HTML contradicts the publisher's desires to protect their  
author's text and eliminates the copyright protection that has made  
them willing to make their content accessible online through us at all.  
If the file is available for download, any internet search engine may  
index it. In fact any Internet search engine may index our publisher's  
copyrighted holdings so long as they agree not to undermine the  
publisher's desires to protect their content.


With regard to reducing the value of the research and the benefits of  
unfettered access, what we are trying to do is to enable the  
information that is copyrighted and made accessible by the publisher to  
seamlessly interact with the information that is made available by  
institutions, or individuals-- essentially enabling and facilitating a  
virtual collaboration between the publisher, the institution and the  
individual.


The software that we have developed essentially builds databases from  
documents at the rate of 6,000,000 + pages per week or 24,000,000 pages  
per month at our current capacity. Admittedly we do not operate at this  
capacity yet but the advantage of how we have built our system enables  
us to scale our operations quickly. Another advantage of what we have  
built is that through documents submitted to our system, each  
institution may have access to their own collection of their content as  
well as aggregate their content with other institution's collections.  
This enables any ebrary enabled database to be integrated with any  
non-ebrary database and any other ebrary enabled commercial databases  
of copyrighted information with access levels that are appropriate to  
the publisher's interests. This ability to build custom databases form  
any other set of distinct databases enables individuals and  
institutions to create unique compilations of documents based on their  
research needs. I personally find that this is difficult to explain and  
is much better served by a demonstration.


There are a number of features that ebrary supports that are also of  
benefit to the researcher, but my intent is not to try to sell our  
system but instead offer what information is necessary to correct what  
is most probably a misperception that is common in the field.


We are in the process of establishing a focus group to help us define  
the requirements of our software for this community. If you are willing  
I would appreciate it if you would consider being a part of our focus  
group. This would enable us to benefit from your perceptions of what is  
needed and enable you to have some of your requirements implemented in  
in future releases of our software. Individuals participating in this  
focus group will have the opportunity to have their institution  
participate in a pilot program at the completion of the focus groups.  
If this is of interest to you please let me know and I will have Marty  
contact you.


Stevan, thank you very much again for your comments. I view my coming  
across your article as serendipitous based upon what we are trying to  
do. I hope that you will participate in our focus group.


Best regards,

Christopher Warnock

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Christopher Warnock]

Stevan,

I have read your comments with regard to free access vs. open access 
and I am curious as to your thoughts regarding copyrights and open 
access and how it relates to ebrary, if at all.


As a matter of interest/ potential discussion, ebrary has created 
http://librarycenter.ebrary.com , a resource for librarians and any 
other interested parties that allows viewing, copying and printing, but 
not downloading of information. According to your article, this 
constitutes free access and not open access.


I would appreciate the opportunity to hear your thoughts on what we are 
doing.


Sincerely,

Christopher Warnock
CEO~ebrary

318 Cambridge Avenue
Palo Alto, Ca 94306

408 910-4161

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

  On the Deep Disanalogy
  Between Text and Software and
  Between Text and Data
  Insofar as Free/Open Access is Concerned

  Stevan Harnad

It would be a *great* conceptual and strategic mistake for the movement
dedicated to open access to peer-reviewed research (BOAI)
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ to conflate its sense of "free"
vs. open" with the sense of "free vs. open" as it is used in the
free/open-source software movements. The two senses are not at all the
same, and importing the software-movements' distinction just adds to
the still widespread confusion and misunderstanding that there is in
the research community about toll-free access.

I will try to state it in the simplest and most direct terms possible:
Software is code that you use to *do* things. It may not be enough to
let you use the code for free to do things, because one of the things you
may want to do is to modify the code so it will do *other* things. Hence
you may need not only free use of the code, but the code itself has to
be open, so you can see and modify it.

There is simply *no counterpart* to this in peer-reviewed research
article use. None. Researchers, in using one another's articles, are
using and re-using the *content* (what the articles are reporting), and
not the *code* (i.e., the actually words in the text). Yes, they read the
text. Yes (within limits) they may quote it. Yes, it is helpful to be able
to navigate the code by character-string and boolean searching. But what
researchers are fundamentally *not* doing in writing their own articles
(which build on the articles they have read) is anything faintly analogous
to modifying the code for the original article!

I hope that that is now transparent, having been pointed out and written
in longhand like this. So if it is obvious that what researchers do with
the articles they read is not to modify the text in order to generate a
new text, as programmers may modify a program to generate a new program,
then where on earth did this open/free source/access conflation come from?

And there is a second conflation inherent in it, namely, a conflation
between research publishing (i.e., peer-reviewed journal articles) and
public data-archiving (scientific and scholarly databases consisting of
the raw and processed data on which the research reports are based).

Digital data archiving (e.g., the various genome databases, astrophysical
databases, etc.) is relatively new, and it is a powerful *supplement*
to peer-reviewed article publishing. In general, the data are not *in*
the published article, they are *associated with* it. In paper days, there
was not the page-quota or the money to publish all the data. And even
in digital days, there is no standardized practice yet of making the raw
data as public as the research findings themselves; but there is definite
movement in that direction, because of its obvious power and utility.

The point, however, is this: As of today, articles and data are not
the same thing. The 2,000,000 new articles appearing every year in the
planet's 20,000 peer-reviewed journals (the full-text literature that
-- as we cannot keep reminding ourselves often enough, apparently --
the open/free access movement is dedicated to freeing from access-tolls)
consists of articles only, *not* the research data on which the articles
are based.

Hence, today, the access problem concerns toll-access to the full-texts
of 2,000,000 articles published yearly, not access to the data on which
they are based (most of which are not yet archived online, let alone
published; and, when they *are* archived online, they are often already
publicly accessible toll-free!). 

No doubt research practices will evolve toward making all data
accessible to would-be users, along with the articles reporting the
research findings. This is quite natural, and in line with researchers'
desire to maximize the use and hence the impact of their research. What
may happen is that journals will eventually include some or all the
underlying data as part of the peer-reviewed publication itself (there
may even be "peer-reviewed data"), but in an online digital supplement
only, rather than in the paper edition.

(What is *dead-certain*, though, is that, as this happens, authors will
not be idiotic enough to sign over copyright for their research data to
their publishers, the same way they have been signing over copyright
for the texts of their research reports! So let's not even waste time on
that implausible hypothetical contingency. The research community may be
slow off the mark in reaching for the free-access that is already within
its grasp in the online era, but they have not altogether taken leave
of their senses!)

But that bridge (digital data supplements), if it ever comes, can be
crossed if/when we get to it. Right now, when we are talking about
the peer-reviewed literature to which we are trying to free access we
are talking about 

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Thomas Krichel]

  Matthew Cockerill writes

> * The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).  The
> * freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs
> * > (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for
> * this.
>
> * The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
> (freedom 2).
>
> * The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements
> to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom
> 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

  Thank you for pointing this out.  I have always held these ideas
  (as formulated by Richard Stallman) in high esteem. This is where
  I see the main role of the OAI, as  to provide metadata on primary
  works with which secondary, i.e. abstracting and indexing services
  can be built, as I pointed out in my presentation to the ALA,

http://openlib.org/home/krichel/presentations/toronto_2003-06-22.ppt

> BioMed Central's policy of Open Access is based on a giving the
> scientific community a similarly broad freedom to make use of the
> research articles that we publish. This includes giving access to
> the structured form of the articles, and giving the right to
> redistribute and create derivative works from the articles.

  It will take a long time until the ideas of reusable code will
  move from the hacker community to the academic community. Part
  of that time delay comes from the underlying matter, i.e.
  academic research is not as immediately reusable as
  object-oriented software code. Another reason for the delay
  is the social environment. It matters a lot more who has
  written a research paper than who has written a piece
  of code. Because of that the open access movement must
  make sure that the transition to open access is demonstrably
  rational for each academic, not just collectively
  rational for the academic community as a whole. This is
  not a trivial task. We need to have freely-available
  conventional abstract and indexing data, as well as
  evaluative data.

  Cheers,

  Thomas Krichel  mailto:kric...@openlib.org
  visiting CO PAH, Novosibirsk   http://openlib.org/home/krichel
 RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Thomas Krichel]

  Barry Mahon writes

>  The actual technical aspects of the database loading may be
> irrelevant but there is an important corollorary - secondary
> information services (abstracting and indexing) play an increasingly
> important role as the primary literature becomes more and more
> diffused in the location of its primary publication. These are
> certainly not free - it costs a lot of money to collect and collate
> the material, even though a number of the organisations doing this
> work are non-profit, such as Chemical Abstracts, Inspec, etc.

  There are free abstract and indexing services around, see
  CiteSeer, http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs, DBLP, see
  http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/, for computer
  science and RePEc, http://repec.org, for economics.
  I am the principal founder of RePEc and I am in the process of
  implementing the ideas behind this collection for Computing
  and Library and Information Science, see http://rclis.org. Not
  much there yet, though, because such systems take a long
  time to be produce.

>  BTW, ICSTI will be holding a meeting in January 2004 on the topic
> of the 'new economic models'

  The trick is to get the community involed, in that way you
  minimize cost on a central collection. The RePEc collection
  illustrates this masterfully.


  Cheers,

  Thomas Krichel  mailto:kric...@openlib.org
  visiting CO PAH, Novosibirsk   http://openlib.org/home/krichel
 RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Barry Mahon]

>
>Date:Thu, 14 Aug 2003 12:41:01 +0100
>From:Sally Morris 
>Subject: Re: Free Access vs. Open Access
>
>5)Whether the item and/or its metadata are deposited in certain
>types of databases (this last seems to me supremely irrelevant)

The actual technical aspects of the database loading may be irrelevant but there
is an important corollorary - secondary information services (abstracting and
indexing) play an increasingly important role as the primary literature becomes
more and more diffused in the location of its primary publication. These are
certainly not free - it costs a lot of money to collect and collate the 
material, even
though a number of the organisations doing this work are non-profit, such as
Chemical Abstracts, Inspec, etc.


BTW, ICSTI will be holding a meeting in January 2004 on the topic of the 'new
economic models' as they apply to science publishing, of which the Fee or Free
and Open v Free are important aspects.


Barry Mahon, Executive Director, ICSTI

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Matthew Cockerill]

Sally,

The open source software community refer to your Axis (1) using the
shorthand 'free, as in beer'

Sure, if you are given some limited access to something and that access is
'free, as in beer', that can be very useful.
In the world of software, say, that would apply to Windows Media Player,
which you can download for free from the Microsoft website (even though the
software itself is highly proprietary, and Microsoft would not take kindly
to you reverse-engineering it or distributing a modified version).

But free/open source software is more than 'free as in beer', it is 'free as
in speech', and this offers hugely significant extra freedoms (which is why
open source software has had such a revolutionary effect on the software
industry).

The Free Software Foundation defines these freedoms as:
* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs
(freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom
2).
* The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the
public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the
source code is a precondition for this.

(see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html )

This philosophy fits exceptionally well with the needs of the scientific
community to share and build on each others research, which is why very many
academic software development projects are developed using an open source
model. Hundreds of biological open source software projects are listed on
the following 2 sites:
http://bioinformatics.org/
http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=252

BioMed Central's policy of Open Access is based on a giving the scientific
community a similarly broad freedom to make use of the research articles
that we publish. This includes giving access to the structured form of the
articles, and giving the right to redistribute and create derivative works
from the articles.

This isn't just a philosophical issue - it has practical implications:

e.g. in the August 14 issue of Nature (Vol 424 p727), Donat Agosti, from the
American Museum of Natural History, New York, laments the fact that the
www.antbase.org  database of ant taxonomy is missing much critical
information because a large fraction of all descriptions of new ant species
are covered by publisher copyright.

In a true Open Access environment, not only could Antbase link to the
articles on the publishers web site, but it could also make use the images
and the text within those published descriptions to compile a universal and
authoritative catalog of Ant taxonomy.

Finally, to respond to your point questioning the benefits of deposition in
a standard repository:

Although theoretically it might not matter where something is available, or
in what format, it should be clear that in practical terms these are
abolutely vital issues.  So for example, theoretically, every DNA sequencing
lab could put up its own web page and make available the sequences they
themselves have obtained, using their own choice of format. The scientific
community would thereby have free access to all those DNA sequences. But in
fact, the deposition of all DNA sequences in a standard format with Genbank
has a truly enormous benefit in practical terms, and has served as a crucial
foundation for the development of tools to mine the genome. PubMed Central's
role as an repository for biomedical research articles is very much
analagous to Genbank's role as a repository for DNA sequence data.

Matt
==
Matthew Cockerill Ph.D.
Technical Director
BioMed Central Limited (http://www.biomedcentral.com)
34-42, Cleveland Street
London W1T 4LB

Tel. +44 20 7631 9127
Fax. +44 20 7580 1938
Email. m...@biomedcentral.com


> -Original Message-
> From: Sally Morris [mailto:sec-...@alpsp.org]
> Sent: 14 August 2003 12:41
> To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org
> Subject: Re: Free Access vs. Open Access
>
>
> I think part of the problem may be that we are considering
> various different
> 'axes' in trying to define 'Open Access':
>
> 1)Whether or not it's free to access (not, we should
> remember, a
> requirement of OAI!).
> 2) If it is free to access, how the costs are covered
> 3)Whether it is 'public domain' (or some variant
> thereof) or not
> 4)Whether OAI-compliant metadata is exposed
> 5)Whether the item and/or its metadata are deposited
> in certain
> types of databases (this last seems to me supremely irrelevant)
>
> If what we're seeking to achieve is the widest possible
> access for readers,
> then only 1 is vital, though 4 is also helpful.
>
> However, whether this will actuall

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

On Thu, 14 Aug 2003, Sally Morris wrote:

> I think part of the problem may be that we are considering various different
> 'axes' in trying to define 'Open Access':
>
> 1)Whether or not it's free to access (not, we should remember, a
> requirement of OAI!).

OAI is not the relevant "OA" in this, BOAI is. OAI is merely a
digital interoperability protocol; it is BOAI that is concerned with
access.

> 2) If it is free to access, how the costs are covered

Whose costs, and costs of what?

There is BOAI-1, which is author/institution self-archiving
of their own published articles (published in toll-access journals).
The authors and their institutions cover their own (negligible)
self-archiving costs and the toll-access publishers carry on as before,
covering costs out of the access-tolls.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/

Then there is BOAI-2, which is open-access journal publishing. Open
access journals have their own cost-recovery models.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals

> 3)Whether it is 'public domain' (or some variant thereof) or not

What is the "it" that is public domain? Certainly not researchers'
articles, whether published in toll-access journals or open-access
journals.

> 4)Whether OAI-compliant metadata is exposed

OAI-compliance pertains to whether the (full-text)
access is efficient, not to whether it is toll-free.

> 5)Whether the item and/or its metadata are deposited in certain
> types of databases (this last seems to me supremely irrelevant)

I agree it's irrelevant, if by "certain type" you mean Eprints
vs. DSpace. It's certainly not irrelevant whether the item (full-text)
is deposited in a database *at all*, for if it is not deposited in an
open access database of *some* type, it is not open access. 

Whether that database type is institutional and distributed, disciplinary
and central, or the toll-free access database of an open-access or a
toll-access publisher is an implementational and strategic matter. And
whether or not that database is OAI-compliant is a matter of functionality
and efficiency (OAI-compliant databases greatly prefereed!).

> If what we're seeking to achieve is the widest possible access for readers,
> then only 1 is vital, though 4 is also helpful.

Agreed. But 1 (toll-free access) presupposes 5 (presence in an
open-access database) too.

> However, whether this will actually happen must depend, as Stevan keeps
> pointing out, on author behaviour.

Depends on the referent for "this": BOAI-1 or BOAI-2? BOAI-1
(self-archiving) depends only on author behaviour. BOAI-2 (open-access
publishing) depends on the behaviours of many different parties: (1)
publishers (are they willing to found new OA journals, or convert from
TA to OA publishing?), (2) authors (are they willing to submit to new OA
journals rather than their established TA journals?), and (3) users (will
they read and cite the articles in the new OA journals as much as the ones
in the established TA journals?). OA definitely has the edge on visibility
and accessibility, but OA journals have an initial handicap for being new.

> Unless free access (plus or minus all
> the rest) is demonstrably better at achieving the things that motivate
> authors - ultimately career progression, funding (via such intermediates as
> citation) - there is no reason why they should change;

Free access is demonstrably better, so it is only the empirical facts about
its being better that need to be conveyed to the research community:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.ppt 
It is not only an empirical finding, hover, but an a-priori logical
fact, that anything that blocks research access also blocks research
impact. It is merely taking a while for this token to drop in the research
community's collective mind.

> they are no more altruistic than the rest of us.

No one is calling for altruism. Self-archiving is an appeal to
researchers' self-interest:

Harnad, S. (2003) Self-Archive Unto Others as Ye Would Have
Them Self-Archive Unto You. The Australian Higher Education
Supplement. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003)
Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint
Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment
Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Ariadne-RAE.htm

Harnad, S. (2003) Measuring and Maximising UK Research
Impact. Times Higher Education Supplement. Friday, June 6 2003.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/thes.html

Harnad, S. (2003) Maximising Research Impact Through Self-Archiving.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/che.htm

> It's my view that what we should be doing
> is trying to gather some valid evidence one way or the other.

We're working on it!

"How to compare research impact of toll- vs. open-access research"
http://www.ecs.sot

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Sally Morris]

I think part of the problem may be that we are considering various different
'axes' in trying to define 'Open Access':

1)Whether or not it's free to access (not, we should remember, a
requirement of OAI!).
2) If it is free to access, how the costs are covered
3)Whether it is 'public domain' (or some variant thereof) or not
4)Whether OAI-compliant metadata is exposed
5)Whether the item and/or its metadata are deposited in certain
types of databases (this last seems to me supremely irrelevant)

If what we're seeking to achieve is the widest possible access for readers,
then only 1 is vital, though 4 is also helpful.

However, whether this will actually happen must depend, as Stevan keeps
pointing out, on author behaviour.  Unless free access (plus or minus all
the rest) is demonstrably better at achieving the things that motivate
authors - ultimately career progression, funding (via such intermediates as
citation) - there is no reason why they should change;  they are no more
altruistic than the rest of us.  It's my view that what we should be doing
is trying to gather some valid evidence one way or the other.

Just my opinion!

Sally

Sally Morris, Secretary-General
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK

Phone:  01903 871686 Fax:  01903 871457 E-mail:  sec-...@alpsp.org
ALPSP Website  http://www.alpsp.org


- Original Message -
From: "Steve Hitchcock" 
To: 
Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2003 6:48 PM
Subject: Re: Free Access vs. Open Access


> This debate between Stevan Harnad and Matthew Cockerill about what
> constitutes 'open access' appears to resolve to whether or not a full-text
> document has a machine interface to the full text, for datamining
purposes,
> as well as a user interface. In the absence of evidence of gerrymandered
> free access preventing e.g. download, save, grep, or print-off, Harnad is
> happy to accept free as a sufficient criterion.
>
> There is another view of 'free', not untypical of publishers, a version of
> which was recently expressed by Michael J Held of Rockefeller University
Press
> http://www.jcb.org/cgi/content/full/jcb.200307018v1
> According to Held, while free access to information is 'powerful and
> alluring', the open access publishing model is 'unproven' and possibly
> 'unsustainable'. Here free refers to back content (PubMed Central and
> Highwire models) and regional access (defined by the World Health
> Organization as developing nations).
>
> Separately, and not uncoincidentally, Peter Suber compares definitions of
> open access from some of the major open access initiatives
> https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OANews/Message/96.html
> To me this is the most notable statement:
> "The most important element by far is that open-access literature is
> available online free of charge. This is the element that catalyzed the
> open-access movement, and the element that defined "free online
> scholarship". To this day, it's the only element mentioned when
journalists
> don't have space for a full story."
>
> But how can this version be differentiated from Held's version of free?
> With the addition of the words 'immediate (upon initial publication)' and
> 'universal' to that of 'free' in the conditions of open access. (Peter
goes
> on, legitimately, to note some additional access barriers that might make
> him reluctant to adopt 'universal' here, but only one of these - Handicap
> access barriers - is within the remit of open access content producers.)
>
> Some wish to go further, but surely these are the only terms that are
> necessary in a definition of open access. Alone, free is insufficient.
>
> Steve Hitchcock
> IAM Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science
> University of Southampton SO17 1BJ,  UK
> Email: sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk
> Tel:  +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
>
>
> At 00:10 12/08/03 +0100, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> >On Mon, 11 Aug 2003, Matthew Cockerill wrote:
> >
> > >sh>   "The use one makes of those full texts is to read them,
> > >sh>print them off, quote/comment them, cite them, and use
> > >sh>their *contents* in further research, building on them.
> > >sh>What is "re-use"? And what is "redistribution" (when
> > >sh>everyone on the planet with access to the web has access
> > >sh>to the full-text of every such article)?"
> > >
> > > Having free access to articles on the publisher's website would
certai

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

Steve Hitchcock (unwittingly) raises a logical point about "indexicals,"
whose meaning and truth depends on when and where they are uttered:

If I say: "All humans are free," then for that (present-tense) proposition
-- i.e., not "some" but "all," and not "were free," not "will be free",
not "might be free" not "could be free," but "are free" -- to be true
rather than false, now, it has to be the case, *now*, that all humans
are free. A single exception, anywhere, now, makes the proposition
false, everywhere, now.

If humans have been in chains till yesterday, then "All humans are free"
only becomes true on the day they are all free, everywhere. A single
unfree human, anywhere, falsifies it. And in particular, the proposition
"this human is free" is false of this human, today, here, if he is not
free today (but only tomorrow, maybe).

The objective of the free-access movement is to make the following
proposition true: "All articles (in the 20K peer-reviewed
journals) are free."

That proposition is false in general as long as any article is not
free. And it is false in particular of any article that is not
free (including articles that are not "yet" free).

Now let us examine Steve Hitchcock's observation about Michael
Held's definition of "free access":

On Tue, 12 Aug 2003, Steve Hitchcock wrote:

> There is another view of 'free', not untypical of publishers, a version of
> which was recently expressed by Michael J Held of Rockefeller University
> Press http://www.jcb.org/cgi/content/full/jcb.200307018v1
> According to Held, while free access to information is 'powerful and
> alluring', the open access publishing model is 'unproven' and possibly
> 'unsustainable'. Here free refers to back content (PubMed Central and
> Highwire models) and regional access (defined by the World Health
> Organization as developing nations).
>
> [H]ow can [free access] be differentiated from Held's version of ["free"]
> With [Peter Suber's] addition of the words 'immediate (upon initial
> publication)' and 'universal' to that of 'free' in the conditions of
> open access
>
> Some wish to go further, but surely these are the only terms that are
> necessary in a definition of open access. Alone, free is insufficient.

In view of the indexical nature of the present-tense predicate "is free,"
I think neither the "now" nor the "everywhere" are needed. "Free" is
sufficient, and sufficient to disqualify Michael Held's predicate as
simply self-contradictory, on the time-scale. (However, Peter's
reminders of the here and now are never a bad idea.)

Harnad, Stevan (2001) AAAS's Response: Too Little, Too Late
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/291/5512/2318b

But please, amidst all this semiological fussing, let us not forget that
our task is not definition optimization but access liberation, now.

And let us not forgot that in the long run we are (sic) all dead. Free
access now!

Stevan Harnad

NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at
the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02 & 03):


http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
or
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html

Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Steve Hitchcock]

This debate between Stevan Harnad and Matthew Cockerill about what
constitutes 'open access' appears to resolve to whether or not a full-text
document has a machine interface to the full text, for datamining purposes,
as well as a user interface. In the absence of evidence of gerrymandered
free access preventing e.g. download, save, grep, or print-off, Harnad is
happy to accept free as a sufficient criterion.

There is another view of 'free', not untypical of publishers, a version of
which was recently expressed by Michael J Held of Rockefeller University Press
http://www.jcb.org/cgi/content/full/jcb.200307018v1
According to Held, while free access to information is 'powerful and
alluring', the open access publishing model is 'unproven' and possibly
'unsustainable'. Here free refers to back content (PubMed Central and
Highwire models) and regional access (defined by the World Health
Organization as developing nations).

Separately, and not uncoincidentally, Peter Suber compares definitions of
open access from some of the major open access initiatives
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OANews/Message/96.html
To me this is the most notable statement:
"The most important element by far is that open-access literature is
available online free of charge. This is the element that catalyzed the
open-access movement, and the element that defined "free online
scholarship". To this day, it's the only element mentioned when journalists
don't have space for a full story."

But how can this version be differentiated from Held's version of free?
With the addition of the words 'immediate (upon initial publication)' and
'universal' to that of 'free' in the conditions of open access. (Peter goes
on, legitimately, to note some additional access barriers that might make
him reluctant to adopt 'universal' here, but only one of these - Handicap
access barriers - is within the remit of open access content producers.)

Some wish to go further, but surely these are the only terms that are
necessary in a definition of open access. Alone, free is insufficient.

Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton SO17 1BJ,  UK
Email: sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel:  +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865


At 00:10 12/08/03 +0100, Stevan Harnad wrote:

On Mon, 11 Aug 2003, Matthew Cockerill wrote:

>sh>   "The use one makes of those full texts is to read them,
>sh>print them off, quote/comment them, cite them, and use
>sh>their *contents* in further research, building on them.
>sh>What is "re-use"? And what is "redistribution" (when
>sh>everyone on the planet with access to the web has access
>sh>to the full-text of every such article)?"
>
> Having free access to articles on the publisher's website would certainly
> offer progress compared to the current status quo. But it would not offer
> anything like the benefits of true open access.

Free access to the current 20,000 journals (2 million articles yearly)
would be like the difference between night and day. Compared to that,
the difference between "free" and "true open" access amounts to just a
few degrees of luminosity.

But let me agree at once that if free access were gerrymandered so
all the user could do was to browse the text on-screen, without being
able to download, save, grep, or print-off, then that would indeed
arbitrarily limit free access's usefulness. How many (if any) of the
several million free-access refereed-journal articles currently on the
web, however -- whether BOAI-1, BOAI-2, or otherwise -- are gerrymandered
in that way? If (as I suspect) the answer is "very few" or even "none
that I know of," then this hypothetical constraint is not worth another
moment's thought or energy diverted from the real task at hand, which
is to turn night into day, as soon as possible.

> Here are just some of the
> reasons why re-use and re-distribution rights are vital to open access:
>
> (1) Digital permanence - it is not enough for the publisher to be the only
> body which curates the full archive of published research content. To
ensure
> long term digital permanence of the scientific record, it is vital that
> articles should be deposited with multiple archives, and redistributable
> from and between those archives.

It seems to me that this is conflating (arbitrarily) two completely
independent matters. One is toll-free online *access* to the articles
in the 20K journals that are currently only accessible via tolls. The
other is the *preservation* of that toll-based corpus.

Well, preservation of that toll-based corpus was always a concern, in
on-paper days as in on-line days, and the concern has nothing whatsoever
to do with free (or open) access! We could have a failsafe preservation
system without free access, or we could have a failsafe preservation
with free access; or we could have an uncertain preservation system
without free access (as we do now) or an uncertain preservati

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

On Mon, 11 Aug 2003, Matthew Cockerill wrote:

>sh>   "The use one makes of those full texts is to read them,
>sh>print them off, quote/comment them, cite them, and use
>sh>their *contents* in further research, building on them.
>sh>What is "re-use"? And what is "redistribution" (when
>sh>everyone on the planet with access to the web has access
>sh>to the full-text of every such article)?"
>
> Having free access to articles on the publisher's website would certainly
> offer progress compared to the current status quo. But it would not offer
> anything like the benefits of true open access.

Free access to the current 20,000 journals (2 million articles yearly)
would be like the difference between night and day. Compared to that,
the difference between "free" and "true open" access amounts to just a
few degrees of luminosity.

But let me agree at once that if free access were gerrymandered so
the only thing the user could do was to browse the text on-screen,
without being able to download, save, grep, or print-off, then that
would indeed arbitrarily limit free access's usefulness. How many
(if any) of the several million free-access refereed-journal articles
currently on the web, however -- whether BOAI-1, BOAI-2, or otherwise --
are gerrymandered in that way? If (as I suspect) the answer is "very few"
or even "none that I know of," then this hypothetical constraint is not
worth another moment's thought or energy diverted from the real task at
hand, which is to turn night into day, as soon as possible!

> Here are just some of the
> reasons why re-use and re-distribution rights are vital to open access:
>
> (1) Digital permanence - it is not enough for the publisher to be the only
> body which curates the full archive of published research content. To ensure
> long term digital permanence of the scientific record, it is vital that
> articles should be deposited with multiple archives, and redistributable
> from and between those archives.

It seems to me that this is conflating (arbitrarily) two completely
independent matters. One is toll-free online *access* to the articles
in the 20K journals that are currently only accessible via tolls. The
other is the *preservation* of that toll-based corpus.

Well, preservation of that toll-based corpus was always a concern, in
on-paper days as in on-line days, and that concern has nothing whatsoever
to do with free (or open) access! We could have a failsafe preservation
system without free access, or we could have a failsafe preservation
system with free access; or we could have an uncertain preservation system
without free access (as we do now) or an uncertain preservation system
with free access (bringing the present system out into the light of day).

The preservation burden has to be (and will be, and is being) faced in
any case. Why on earth should that entirely orthogonal longterm
task be coupled in *any way* to the immediate and urgent problem of free
access today? And why should "open access" be linked with or defined in
terms of the eventual solution to the preservation problem, one way or
the other? (This is not an argument for indifference to preservation! it
is an argument for decoupling two completely independent desiderata,
so as not to slow the growth of open access with irrelevant added
burdens.)

> (2) A flexible choice of tools for searching and browsing
> The reason that Google exists is because the web is free for anyone to
> download and index. As a result, there is competition among search engines,
> and Google had the incentive to develop a better system for indexing web
> pages, which has since driven other search engine companies to improve the
> tools they offer.
>
> Compare this with the situation with scientific research. If the research
> resides only on the publisher's site, you don't have a free choice of what
> tools you use to search and browse it - you are stuck with what that
> particular publisher provides you with.

We are quite squarely in the domain of hypotheticals here. (Which
publisher's free-access corpus, inaccessible to google, are we talking
about?) But let us suppose that a publisher does provide free access --
not gerrymandered free access, but free access that allows individual
downloading, saving, grepping and printing:

First, I will bet that such a publisher will want to maximize the
visibility and impact of his journals' contents by allowing at least
the indexing metadata to be harvested, both by google, and by the OAI
search engines specializing in the refereed journal literature.

But even if we get doubly hypothetical here, and suppose the publisher
does *not* disclose the metadata to harvesters, there is
still a super-simple solution: Every author has an online
CV. Their CV will contain the metadata for every one of their
journal publications. (Such CVs can and will be OAI-compliant:
http://paracite.eprints.org/cgi-bin/rae_front.cgi ).
Add the URL for the free-access 

Re: Free Access vs. Open Access

[Matthew Cockerill]

ssemble a
comparison of the methods used for a certain technique).
In an open access world, as long as they cite the sources, they are
completely free to create and redistribute that compilation. Such a
selective compilation may in itself be extremely useful contribution to
science.

(5) Print redistribution rights - the National Health Service, for example,
should be able to redistribute thousands of printed copies of an important
research article (which it may have funded) to its doctors if it wishes to
do so. It should not have to pay a hefty copyright fee for the privilege.
Certainly, print redistribution will likely become less significant in the
future, but there is no logical reason that the scientific community should
not be free to exchange and distribute the research that it has created in
print form, as well as online.

Matt Cockerill

==
Matthew Cockerill Ph.D.
Technical Director
BioMed Central Limited (http://www.biomedcentral.com)
34-42, Cleveland Street
London W1T 4LB

Email: m...@biomedcentral.com


> -Original Message-
> From: Stevan Harnad [mailto:har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk]
> Sent: 11 August 2003 03:40
> To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org
> Subject: Free Access vs. Open Access
>
>
> BioMedCentral's "Open Access Now" is a useful newsletter, but
> its first
> editorial contains some inadvertently misleading information
> that needs
> to be corrected. What
> http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/#article1
> actually said was this:
>
> > "Free Access is not Open Access"
> >
> > "There seems to be a general misunderstanding that the
> aim of the
> > Open Access movement is to make the scientific research
> literature
> > free online. But there is a difference between "free access"
> > and "open access"...
> >
> > "The benefits and promise of Open Access will only be realized
> > when this distinction is clear in the minds of authors and
> > publishers. Only then can the literature move from being `free'
> > to being truly `open'."
>
> I will quote/comment the full (short) editorial in a moment to show
> why I think what it *should* instead have said is this:
>
> "Open Access Calls for Both Free Access and Open Usage"
>
> "There seems to be a general misunderstanding that the
> aim of the Open
> Access movement is *only* to make the scientific research
> literature
> free online... That is the first aim, but it also aims to make it
> fully usable."
>
> The difference between the two messages is substantial. We
> are very far
> from having free access to the refereed research literature,
> even though
> it is within reach; vast amounts of potential research impact are for
> this reason being needlessly lost; and it is free access that
> is urgently
> needed to put an end to this loss. What free access we do have today,
> however, is not constrained by any usage constraints. Hence the
> difference between "free access" and "open access" is merely
> hypothetical right now: What is needed is more free access, not an
> extension of free access to open access. To imply otherwise
> is simply to
> saddle the research community with yet another red herring, instead of
> what it really needs.
>
> Here is the current situation, in rough practical and statistical
> terms:
>
> (a) What the BOAI seeks is unrestricted toll-free
> full-text online access to the entire refereed research corpus
> (20,000 journals, 2,000,000 articles per year).
> http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
>
> (b) The way to achieve this is for researchers to (1)
> publish their
> papers in open-access journals whenever suitable ones exist
> (under 5% currently) and, for the rest of their papers (95%), to
> (2) self-archive them in their own institutional archives. [(1)
> is BOAI Strategy 2, and (2) is BOAI Strategy 1.]
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
> http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
>
> (c) Any form of restricted, gerrymandered online access (such as
> "ebrary"-based access that prevents down-loading, saving or
> printing-off) would not be open access (but there is none in sight
> so far to speak of).
>
> That is all there is to it! Now, for those who are interested, a more
> detailed quote/comment of the full (short) BMC editorial:
>
> > Free Access is not Open Access
>
> Not necessarily, in theory; but in reality and in practise,
> *all* of the
> growing body of research today that is free-access is also
> open-access:
> http://www.ecs.soto

Free Access vs. Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

BioMedCentral's "Open Access Now" is a useful newsletter, but its first
editorial contains some inadvertently misleading information that needs
to be corrected. What http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/#article1
actually said was this:

> "Free Access is not Open Access"
>
> "There seems to be a general misunderstanding that the aim of the
> Open Access movement is to make the scientific research literature
> free online. But there is a difference between "free access"
> and "open access"...
>
> "The benefits and promise of Open Access will only be realized
> when this distinction is clear in the minds of authors and
> publishers. Only then can the literature move from being `free'
> to being truly `open'."

I will quote/comment the full (short) editorial in a moment to show
why I think what it *should* instead have said is this:

"Open Access Calls for Both Free Access and Open Usage"

"There seems to be a general misunderstanding that the aim of the Open
Access movement is *only* to make the scientific research literature
free online... That is the first aim, but it also aims to make it
fully usable."

The difference between the two messages is substantial. We are very far
from having free access to the refereed research literature, even though
it is within reach; vast amounts of potential research impact are for
this reason being needlessly lost; and it is free access that is urgently
needed to put an end to this loss. What free access we do have today,
however, is not constrained by any usage constraints. Hence the
difference between "free access" and "open access" is merely
hypothetical right now: What is needed is more free access, not an
extension of free access to open access. To imply otherwise is simply to
saddle the research community with yet another red herring, instead of
what it really needs.

Here is the current situation, in rough practical and statistical
terms:

(a) What the BOAI seeks is unrestricted toll-free
full-text online access to the entire refereed research corpus
(20,000 journals, 2,000,000 articles per year).
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml

(b) The way to achieve this is for researchers to (1) publish their
papers in open-access journals whenever suitable ones exist
(under 5% currently) and, for the rest of their papers (95%), to
(2) self-archive them in their own institutional archives. [(1)
is BOAI Strategy 2, and (2) is BOAI Strategy 1.]
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/

(c) Any form of restricted, gerrymandered online access (such as
"ebrary"-based access that prevents down-loading, saving or
printing-off) would not be open access (but there is none in sight
so far to speak of).

That is all there is to it! Now, for those who are interested, a more
detailed quote/comment of the full (short) BMC editorial:

> Free Access is not Open Access

Not necessarily, in theory; but in reality and in practise, *all* of the
growing body of research today that is free-access is also open-access:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.ppt

It can all be downloaded, saved, grepped, printed out, quote/commented,
and the URL can be sent to anyone who wishes to do likewise. All data
therein can also be used, *exactly* as they could be if read and copied
from the on-paper version. (It is simply an error, in other words, to
think of refereed, published articles as analogous to the genome database
or to software. It consists instead of texts, which are written to
be printed off, read, used, applied, built-upon, quoted/commented,
and cited. There is no question -- or need -- of republishing them or
altering them. They are already freely accessible to anyone with access
to the Web, and the only ones to update them are the authors; everyone
else must settle for quote/commenting, applying and citing.)

> There seems to be a general misunderstanding that the aim of the Open
> Access movement is to make the scientific research literature free
> online. But there is a difference between "free access" and "open access".

The aim of the Open Access movement *is* to make the scientific
(and scholarly) refereed-journal research literature -- full-text --
accessible toll-free online. Though there may be hypothetical ways
toll-free online access could be constrained so as to prevent
downloading, grepping, or printing, no such thing is happening. All the
free-access literature is also open-access.

> This distinction was part of what motivated the Bethesda definition of
> Open Access Principles that we published in the first issue of Open Access
> Now (July 14, 2003). That definition clearly states that access to the
> information should be free, but in addition the work should be open to
> re-use and redistribution

"Re-use and redistribution" has to be thought out more fully and clearly
than it is in the B