P.

Nice, intriguing post =D

At the risk of sounding too vague, I say Open Access as a movement suffers from a chronic issue of incomplete focus, which is more fundamental than ill definitions and divisions, and leads to them.

As I understand, access is only one part of an open system. So “open access” actually means “access for an open X”, where X in our context happens to be science.

And that is why, as long as one focuses his discourse around access alone, he looses sight of the other aspects without which openness itself cannot be achieved: participation (some call it inclusiveness) and integration (some call it modularity).

In terms of politics, “open access” by itself can be seen as “open data” – which is short for “data for an open government” – without the perspective of open government.

In software terms, “open access” by itself is similar to developing a bunch of “open source applications” without recognizing the goal of building a libre operating system.

So, as I see it, the path to achieve consensus and join forces for “open access” is to ask instead how can we open the process of scientific discovery and the community around it? And what kind of access enables that the most? That will tell us what “open access” has got to be.

Thus, an increasing fraction of the times I’m asked to talk about it, I refer first to open science, and then derive into what kind of access is required for an open science, further observing that it – the so called “open access” – does bring with itself immediate benefits both practical and ethical.

This is not always the right speech to convince most people, but it is the most convincing speech for the right people.

Cheers,
ale

The good thing about the RCUK and other initiatives are that they are serious statements of intent. The funders want to change the landscape and they are the only body that can easily do so (Universities have abdicated any responsibility). The choice of CC-BY is really important. It clarifies the result and shifts the power. I’ll try to write more later.

I also fully agree with the requirement of citizens’ participation. That’s very important yet hugely underestimated by most scholars. What you called “ivorytowerism” is not only bad for society, but mainly it’s bad for academia itself: without healthy relationships with outsiders academia suffocates and turns into art for art’s sake.

Also, I share the scepticism about green route and Institutional Repositories, I was asking about this just recently: http://poynder.blogspot.com/2012/07/oa-interviews-keith-jeffery-uk-science.html?showComment=1341573472687#c5960489624718125031
That’s a fact that IRs don’t provide enough quality of content, for example in terms of licensing terms: different licenses for every document, in most cases licenses are unknown – that makes the content hardly usable for any serious application. General accessibility and ergonomy of user interfaces isn’t any better; likewise their discoverability from search engines. The worst thing is that – despite unquestionable effort put by their developers – there are no chances for IRs to improve over time, because fundamental principles will prohibit any substantial change (e.g., how to unify licenses? that’s just impossible with IRs’ modus operandi) – that’s why I bet on Gold more than on Green. And yes, after considering actual licenses of different documents in IR, claiming IRs to be Open Access is a serious abuse. Maybe some people are mislead by the name “repository” and think that IRs are somehow similar to arXiv – the biggest green “success story” – and will achieve similar success, but the truth is that IRs vastly differ from arxiv, in many respects, and there is no reason to believe that they will achieve any comparable adoption among readers.

Repositories are set up on the basis that they contain single jewels of information that people either know in advance exist (I don’t) or are prepared to spend an hour searching for. I and most scientists want to be able to browse the literature are see what is out there. I am now using machines to do this and which repositories actuall specify to machines that machines are allowed to read an index their content? Not many that I know of. (Of course they let GOOGLE do it because Google is so wonderful and anyway they couldn’t stop it, but my robots are second-class compared to Google)