When scientists read publications they often want to re-use them. What do we mean by “re-use”? Isn’t reading good enough? No. Re-use means that they can take the information in the publication and, while preserving the provenance, use it for other purposes. Typical Web 2.0 uses are “mashups”, where two sets of data are combined. Each by itself carries a simple message, but together they can often add much more. For example if we have 2 sets of independent observations at a series of geographic locations we can often find marvellous things.
Full re-use is described (and I thought defined) in the BBB declarations. Here is a discussion of the value of “green open access” where the reader (always a human) can read, but not normally re-use the information. In contrast “gold open access” should allow full re-use… Many “open access” publishers provide full BBB compliance, but some do not. I argue this is unacceptable and look to the Open Access community to take the same stance:
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Stevan Harnad, On Paid Gold OA, Central Repositories, and “Re-Use” Rights, Open Access Archivangelism, October 9, 2007. Excerpt:
On Tue, 9 Oct 2007 Andrew Albanese, Associate Editor, Library Journal, wrote:
“[J]ust writing to see if you have any thoughts on the UKPMC [UK PubMed Central] statement on re-use…seems a little unnecessary to me. Stating the obvious? Rather than say “copyright still applies,” would it not have been more useful to issue guidelines on, say, how to craft a copyright clause that facilitates open access? Do these broad statements help anyone?”
I agree that the UKPMC re-use statement is unnecessary and stating the obvious….
To begin with, the UKPMC statement is about paid Gold OA, and (for reasons I have adduced many times before) I believe that…paying for Gold OA at this time is unnecessary and a waste of money (until and unless most or all of the institutional money that is currently being spent on subscriptions is released to pay for Gold OA)….Gold OA is far from being either the fastest or surest way to scale up to 100% OA today….The fastest and surest way to provide 100% OA today is for authors to self-archive their (published) articles….
PS: Comment. I can’t agree. While the statement focuses on details of gold OA, it says nothing to encourage gold OA in preference to green OA, and when implemented it will do nothing to slow down green OA. General arguments to prefer green OA are not germane here. Nor does the agreement state the obvious. It describes what re-use rights publishers should provide when funders pay for gold OA. That’s new, beneficial, and important. From my blog comment on Monday: “When a funder pays a publisher to make an article OA, the publisher should remove permission barriers as well as price barriers. But too often publishers have only removed price barriers. This agreement to remove a key set of permission barriers is an important step forward that will help users get their work done (both human and machine users), help funders get full value for their investment, and help all players live up to the full BBB definition of OA.”
PMR: I am completely with PeterS. If authors pay for Open Access they should have all permission barriers removed. Unless this happens we see the mess in hybrid journals where authors pay lots of money for poor products, where permission barriers remain. The Open Access community must speak with one mind on this to help make it absolutely clear to funders of “OA” that it is full removal of permission barriers – no halfway.
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4351742/ against Harnad