Open Access Week – Green is not enough

As today is part of “Open Access Week” (April 7 was when the NIH mandate took effect), I’m trying to write a post a day on the topic…
UPDATE — my use of Green and Gold is not correct — I comment in a later post
For newcomers, there are loosely two forms of Open Access – Green (which allows humans to read an article without charge – priceFree) and Gold (which allows anyone to do more or less whatever they like (datamine, mashup, republish, annotate, etc.) as long as they acknowledge the original author in any derivative works.
The heroic and immensely important BBB declarations (Berlin, Budapest, Bethesda) all unequivocally declared that the phrase “Open Access” meant Gold access. One of the heroes was Stevan Harnad and last week at Southampton I paid tribute to his tireless campaigning..
Recently, however, Stevan has said that he regrets having included the Gold-like clauses in BBB and wants to see the declarations revised to emphasize Green. Many others, including Peter Suber and myself, do not agree. I’ll expand my position later as to why Green Open Access is of very limited valueto scientists.
Here Klaus Graf shows why he has the same position. No apologies for giving it in full.

http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/386-Dont-Risk-Getting-Less-By-Needlessly-Demanding-More.html
Peter Suber has answered at
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/04/price-and-permission-barriers-again.html
Peter Murray-Rust (and I) have often argued that permission barriers
must be removed. See e.g.
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4409408/
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4356023/ (and earlyer posts)
See also
MacCallum CJ (2007) When Is Open Access Not Open Access? PLoS Biol
5(10): e285 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050285
On the recent discussion on textmining and PubMedCentral:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/04/text-mining-licensed-non-oa-literature.html
http://researchremix.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/non-oa-full-text-for-text-mining/
http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=1026
Harnad writes: “OA is free online access. With that comes,
automatically, the individual capability of linking, reading,
downloading, storing, printing off, and data-mining (locally).”
“Data-mining (locally)” is nonsense. If I have to mine 1000 articles
and are allowed to download automatically 10 articles/day I have to
wait 100 days.
Harnad repeats his ideas as mantras. We can do the same:
FAIR USE IS NOT ENOUGH.
There are scholars and scientists outside the U.S. under more rigid
copyright regimes without Fair Use.
Let’s have a closer look on the German Copyright law:
http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__53.html
It is allowed to make copies for scholarly use if and only if
(i) there are good reasons
and
(ii) there is no commercial goal (“keinen gewerblichen Zwecken dient”).
In my humble opinion medical research in a pharma business is
(i) research according BBB
(ii) commercial.
A scientist in this company may according German law (since January 1, 2008) NOT
(i) make copies of scholarly articles (§ 53 Abs. 2 Nr. 2 UrhG) for scholarly use
(ii) data-mining.
On the problems of the new commercial clausula for universities
(“Drittmittelforschung”) see (in German) the position of the
Urheberrechtsbündnis:
http://www.dfn.de/fileadmin/3Beratung/Recht/Expertise-3-korb-urhg.pdf
§ 53 Abs. 2 Nr. 4 allows him making copies (of some articles in a
journal issue) on paper or for non-digital use only. Because data
mining needs digital use our German pharma scientist has only a chance
to mine the CC-BY subset of OA publications (most hybrid journals have
AFAIK CC-BY-NC).
(i) OA is important for all researchers (including commercial research).
(ii) Commercial medical research is important for world’s health problems.
(iii) Data-mining is a new scientific way to solve medical problems.
(iii) Business companies engaged in commercial research cannot and
will not afford journal licenses for large-scale data-mining.
(SCNR: How many people must die because an OA guru says “There is a
need to update BBB” and denies the need of re-use?)
There is a simple solution (I will repeat it because it is important
like a mantra):
* MAKE ALL RESEARCH RESULTS CC-BY
* MAKE ALL RESEARCH RESULTS CC-BY
* MAKE ALL RESEARCH RESULTS CC-BY

PMR: [the extension to data is:
* MAKE ALL RESEARCH RESULTS CC0 or PDDL
PMR: Klaus gives excellent arguments and the German copyright law is particularly compelling. No “green” label can override this whereas a CC-BY can. The idea of local datamining is – as Klaus says – nonsense (sorry Stevan). I have legitimate scientific reasons for downloading every chemistry paper ever published – I want to use OSCAR to check which published results are valid. I want to extract NMR spectra and asses their consistency. I want to plot the use of hazarous solvents against a timeline. etc. We can easily analyse 100,000 papers a day for this sort of thing – the only barrier is Closed access. Science is impoverished
As Peter Suber (see above) and others have made clear it is not a question of Green or Gold. They can be pursued at the same time. Many publishers do not yet realise the value of Gold publishing and when explained they become positive about it (I answered a question on this yesyterday – more later).
In haste

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10 Responses to Open Access Week – Green is not enough

  1. Chris Rusbridge says:

    Peter, you said: “For newcomers, there are loosely two forms of Open Access – Green (which allows humans to read an article without charge – priceFree) and Gold (which allows anyone to do more or less whatever they like (datamine, mashup, republish, annotate, etc.) as long as they acknowledge the original author in any derivative works.”
    I don’t think this is right at all. Wikipedia says:
    “In OA self-archiving (also known as the “green” road to OA [6] [7]), authors publish in a subscription journal, but in addition make their articles freely accessible online, usually by depositing them in either an institutional repository[8] (such as the Okayama University Digital Information Repository[9]) or in a central repository[10] (such as PubMed Central)…
    “…In OA publishing (also known as the “gold” road to OA [14]) authors publish in open access journals that make their articles freely accessible online immediately upon publication. Examples of OA publishers[15] are BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science.”
    In both cases (green AND gold) the permissions set the terms of what you can do. OA journals do not necessarily have licences that allow data mining.
    I’m also not certain that a widely distributed set of repositories (the green road) is particularly resistant to data mining. OAI access should tell you which repositories have data of interest, and you robots can go there.
    Perhaps the real problem is that (a) licences offered are not those you need for the task (whether green or gold), and (b) those licences are rarely expressed in machine-readable form, even though Creative Commons have encodings to allow this. If licences were so expressed, then you could let your robots wander at will, and mine what they are allowed to!

  2. Klaus Graf says:

    I found it was not a good idea by Harnad to choose the same colors as in the “road” metaphor. The last comment shows it is indeed confusing.
    * Green road: Self-Archiving in Repositories
    * Golden road: OA Journals
    * Green OA: cost-free Access (PMR in an earlyer post: FREE access)
    * Gold OA: Access without Permission Barriers (preferably CC-BY) – (PMR: OPEN access)
    These are independent aspects. Most golden road journals (in DOAJ) are access-green, and CC-BY contents in green road IRs are access-golden.

  3. Peter Suber says:

    Hi Peter: Chris is right. There are two distinctions here and we shouldn’t mix them up. One distinction is between green and gold OA, or between OA through repositories and OA through journals. The other is between removing price barriers alone and removing both price and permission barriers. I think you meant to say that removing price barriers is not enough –and I agree with that 100%. But green OA *can* be enough.
    Some green OA removes both price and permission barriers, and some gold OA does as well. But also note the converse. Just as some (perhaps most) green OA doesn’t remove permission barriers, some (perhaps most) gold OA doesn’t either. When we work for the removal of permission barriers, we are working to improve both green and gold OA.

  4. Pingback: Make All Research Results CC-BY « Research Remix

  5. Peter, you do not strengthen your case by repeatedly declining to post my rebuttals.

  6. pm286 says:

    I haven’t received any! And I had been expecting them. And of course I would post and comment on them fairly. I never censor anything other than absolute spam even if I don’t agree.
    I have had problems earlier where mails with many links in them have gone directly and irretrievably into the spam box – I get > 1000 spams per day. This may be the problem. Suggest you either send me emails

  7. pm286 says:

    I have received the following from Steve Hitchcock:
    Peter, I don’t know if the comment facility is working on your blog, but I posted the following note earlier today on this entry:
    A better interpretation of “green” and “gold” – April 10th, 2008
    I agree with your point about the need for better current awareness of OA content, but not with your conclusion that this obviates the need for IRs and self-archiving. As a scientist you are acutely aware of the need for evidence to support a case. In the case of IR current awareness the evidence that this does or does not work isn’t there because no one has tried it. I hope this may change with initiatives like Gold Dust, which is just getting going http://www.hull.ac.uk/golddust/
    We need more like this.
    PMR: It seems like some people are having difficulty commenting on the blog, though others aren’t. We do not censor anything other than raw spam. We suspect that posts with many links may get routed into the spam.
    Steve

  8. Pingback: Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - petermr’s blog » Blog Archive » A better interpretation of “green” and “gold”

  9. pm286 says:

    (9) Thanks very much Stevan. Together with the other link you have left I hope to address some of these points.

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