I have been over-brusque and apologize to Maxine Clarke who has pointed out:
I understand from your post above that you feel my response listing open publications and products is too fuzzy and does not match with what you have been writing in the past few weeks, but frankly I was not responding to anything you have written in the past few weeks, I was responding to your request to give examples of NPG’s “open access” or “free” material. I think you are blowing my response out of proportion because it did not happen to fit into however you have been defining the terms of the discussion. It is your perogative to define terms however you like, but not your perogative to enforce other people to use the same definitions – I know what I mean by “open” or “free” content and I don’t need to be told off by you for having a different definition to whatever your definition is — similarly, you are welcome to your own views and I shall not castigate you for them in a blog posting
I read her comment as replying to the large amount of material I have posted here illustrating the problems of deciding what is meant “open access”. (This matters because it is something that many publishers charge authors for). The uncritical use of “open access” to define a wide range of information products in the industry is very unhelpful. Maxine was unaware of my previous and continuing concern about the need to define this precisely – I was unaware that she was not continuing the debate.
Occasionally this issue raises strong feelings 🙂
Peter,
Doesn’t this exchange serve to underline your original point. If everyone is allowed the “perogative”(sic) to ‘define’ Open Access however they see fit then the term becomes confusing to authors choosing where to publish their work and meaningless for policy makers. If we are in a Humpty Dumpty world where a word like ‘open’ means “just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less” then it is doubly important that the exact copyright or licence under which a paper is published should be easy to determine and unequivocal to interpret.
My response is perhaps over-brusque, so I have put it on my own blog.
In the context of scholarly publishing Open Access has a well-defined meaning, albeit coming in a number of different shades. Across the publishing and library communities I think this is well-understood. Conflating “free content” with Open Access is, in my view, obfuscatory.
Has PMR been brusque? – no, I don’t think so. Clear and firm, yes but brusque, no.
(3) Thanks. P.
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