I’m giving a talk to the UK Serials Group tomorrow and I would like to be able to show articles deposited in PMC under the new mandate. I have no idea whether any have arrived (or whether authors have being doing this for months in anticipation). Any pointers (URLs) would be much appreciated.
While I’m blogging, Bill Hooker has a valuable post reiterating clearly all the points about full Open Access:
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Removal of permission barriers is already part of the definition of OA
He finishes:
Having said all that, though, I’ll add that an explicit description of machine readability requirements would be an addition to the accepted definition of OA — and one that I would welcome. Peter Murray-Rust recently noted that, according to the “price and permission barriers” view of Open Access, PubMed isn’t OA — even PubMed Central isn’t OA.I’ll go even further: can anyone point me to a single Open Access repository? I don’t know of even one such site that removes both price and permission barriers. Surely there must be some, but the Big Names (PubMed Central, arXiv, Cogprints, CiteSeer, RePEc, etc — see ROAR) don’t seem to qualify, because digital objects in these repositories carry their own copyrights, rather than being covered by a blanket license provided by the repository.
Can this be true? Five years after the BBB definition came together, more than ten years since Stevan Harnad’s subversive proposal and on the first day of the NIH mandate — widely referred to as an OA mandate! — can it be that we really don’t have a single truly OA repository in all the world? And if it is true, would it help to make the official definition more explicitly machine-friendly?
PMR: Indeed. I don’t know of a true OA repository (of fulltext) – where a robot can go and be assured that it can download anything without getting letters from lawyers. We MUST develop full machine-readable licences (yes CC has these already for articles, but are they actually used?)
> I don’t know of a true OA repository (of fulltext) – where a robot can go and be assured that it can download anything without getting letters from lawyers.
I do – Wikipedia.