I have still seen very few public comments but have now had comments on this blog from Stevan, PeterS and Klaus Graf which is at least a good spectrum. So I’ll comment in detail, and meanwhile hope to goad some of the silent throng into actually saying something…
Klaus Graf Says:
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:03 pm e
I do not think that’s a good thing if the two leading OA advocates decide “par ordre de Mufti”. The OA community has few free forums. Harnad and Suber are strictly moderating their lists and Suber doesn’t allow comments to his weblog.
PMR: I have sympathy with this view but am trying to remain objective. Klaus is right that there isn’t a clear place to discuss OA. FWIW I do not censor this blog other than spam so anyone can post whatever they wish here.
For me weak OA isn’t enough (and the pejorative connotations of “weak” appropriate) and CC-BY-NC definitively NOT strong OA.
Many thousands of scholars and scientists support the BBB definition of OA which includes commercial use and derivative works. BBB is a necessary condition for strong OA because it is the only authoritative consensus. If one person (Harnad) has another opinion that’s the problem of this person. Harnad and Suber don’t have the right to chance BBB and the accepted definition of OA.
The German librarian and OA advocate Bernd-Christoph Kämper has given some arguments that commercial use is necessary. Like me he regrets that Suber has soften his position.
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4900938/ (Comment in German)
Please read the Archivalia enttries he mentions. They are in English.
PMR: Being objective, Suber and Harnad have created their own terminology. It’s doesn’t have to be agreed by any organisation. Stevan has created several different terminologies in the past – green gray, light green gold, etc which (IMO) were highly confusing. You’ll see from his post below that he wants to get rid of “weak” and “strong” after only a few days. Whatever the rights and wrongs I regret the confusion this will cause. If, after having announced what seemed to be a clear position it is then renamed it will give the message that the community cannot work out what it is talking about
BTW: I agree to license my comments here under the the Creative Commons Attribution-license (default is NonCommercial).
PMR: This list is already CC-BY (after your prompting :-). We originally started with CC-NC, and then changed when we could find out how to fix WordPress.
PMR: In my view the Open Access movement desperately needs a central organisation. The funders and universities are pumping millions if not billions into “OA” and they cannot even define what it is. Open Source has the OSI which determines whether ot not a given licence is OS. Open Knowledge after only a short time of volunteers has the OKF and has an agreed definition and a list of conformant licences. Funders pay money for stuff that is ultra-weak OA, universities haven’t a clue what the status of the material in their repositories is. I ask “Please can I have some Open Access theses from your repository to datamine?” and am told “Sorry we don’t know whether you are allowed to or not” It’s clearer from the British Library – “no to everything.”
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Stevan Harnad Says:
May 2nd, 2008 at 8:23 pm e
Remedy Needed to Prevent Unintended Negative Connotations of “Weak” from Becoming a Liability
Important caveat: “Weak/Strong” OA marks the logical distinction: price-barrier-free access is a necessary condition for permission-barrier-free access, and permission-barrier-free access is a sufficient condition for price-barrier-free access. That is the logic of weak vs. strong conditions.
PMR: Great! The first algorithm I have seen. I agree completely. We need algorithms. strongOA subsumes weakOA.
But since Peter [==PeterS] and I agreed on the distinction, and agreed that both price-barrier-free access and permission-barrier-free access are indeed open access, many of our colleagues have been contacting us to express serious concern about the unintended pejorative connotations of “weak.”
PMR: I think it’s a pity the colleagues are not more openly vocal. Personally I was delighted with the terms “weak” and “strong” as I thought they gave exactly the right connotations. I have no idea whether I’m in a minority because no-one is saying anything.
As a consequence, to avoid this unanticipated and inadvertent bias, the two types of OA cannot be named by the logical conditions (weak and strong) that define them. We will soon announce a more transparent, unbiased pair of names. Current candidates include:
Transparent, self-explanatory descriptors:
USE OA vs. RE-USE OA
READ OA vs. READ-WRITE OA
PRICE OA vs. PERMISSION OA
PMR: There are NO SELF-EXPLANATORY TERMS in OA. Until this is recognised the situation is as bad as ever. I do not understand “RE-USE”. I am certain that I would interpret it differently from Stevan and PeterS. If I interpret somethign differently (as I did with the strongOA/weakOA borderline) it’s not because I’m stupid, or ignorant or wilful, but because it’s not clear. So far we have a score of 2-2 (Suber, Harnad, vs Murray-Rust, Graf) as to where they think the intended border was before it was defined. The definition is arbitrary, not self-explanatory.
What does “PERMISSION” mean? I now have no idea. If I am allowed to read something, that is a permission. If I am allowed to mount it on my web site but no-where else that is a permission. And so forth. I promoted the idea of OA-permission and OA-free (or something like it) some while ago but it didn’t carry weight at the time…
Unless we actually start to define these terms they continue to be of little value
Generic descriptors:
BASIC or GENERIC OR CORE OA vs. EXTENDED or EXTENSIBLE or FULL OA
SOFT OA vs. HARD OA
EASY OA vs. HARD OA
PMR: I don’t see any point in these at all. And unless they are defined they are meaningless.
The ultimate choice of names matters far less than ensuring that the unintended connotations of “weak” cannot be exploited by the opponents of OA, or by the partisans of one of the forms of OA to the detriment of the other. Nor should mandating “weak OA” be discouraged by the misapprehension that it is some sort of sign of weakness or of a deficient desideratum
Stevan Harnad
PMR: The issue is in the balance. Duck the definitions and the publishers will take everything except *-BY for a ride.
In sciences such as Natural Language Processing we have defined metrics. We have a set of annotation guidelines and then require humans to annotate a corpus. For chemical name recognition (i.e. “is this a chemical or not”) the experts agree at 92%. I suspect that if you gave the average involved person (funder, publisher, repositarian) a set of documents on defined sites and asked them whether they were strong or weak OA you would be lucky to get 50% agreement. And 50% is useless.
The Two Forms of OA Are Now Defined: They Now Need Value-Neutral Names
To repeat, “Weak/Strong” OA marks a logical distinction: price-barrier-free access is a necessary condition for permission-barrier-free access, and permission-barrier-free access is a sufficient condition for price-barrier-free access. That is the logic of weak vs. strong conditions.
The purpose of our joint statement with Peter Suber was to make explicit what is already true de facto, which is that both price-barrier-free access and permission-barrier-free access are indeed forms of Open Access (OA), and that virtually all Green OA today, and much of Gold OA today, is just price-barrier-free OA, not permission-barrier-free OA, although we both agree that permission-barrier-free OA is the ultimate desideratum.
But what Peter Suber and I had not anticipated was that if price-barrier-free OA was actually named by its logical condition as “Weak OA” (i.e., the necessary condition for permission-barrier-free OA) then that would create difficulties for those who are working hard for the adoption of the mandates to provide price-barrier-free OA (Green OA self-archiving mandates) that are only now beginning to grow and flourish.
In particular, Professor Bernard Rentier, the Rector of the University of Liege (which has adopted a Green OA self-archiving mandate to provide price-barrier-free OA) is also the founder of EurOpenScholar, which is dedicated to promoting the adoption of Green OA mandates in the universities of Europe and worldwide. Professor Rentier said quite explicitly that if price-boundary-free OA were called “Weak OA,” it would make it much harder to persuade other rectors to adopt Green OA mandates — purely because of the negative connotations of “weak.”
Nor is the solution to try to promote permission-barrier-free (“Strong OA”) mandates instead, for the obstacles and resistance to that are far far greater. We are all agreed that it is not realistic to expect consensus from either authors, university administrators or funders on adoption or compliance with mandates to provide permission-barrier-free OA at this time, and that the growth of price-barrier-free OA should on no account be slowed by or subordinated to efforts to promote permission-barrier-free OA (though all of us are in favour of permission-barrier-free OA too).
So, as the label “weak” would be a handicap, we need another label. The solution is not to spell it out longhand every time either, as “price-barrier-free OA,” etc. That would be as awkward as it would be absurd.
So we are looking for a short-hand or stand-in for “price-barrier-free OA” and “permission-barrier-free OA” that will convey the distinction without any pejorative connotations for either form of OA. The two forms of OA are now defined, explicitly and logically. They are now in need of value-neutral names.
Suggested names are welcome — but not if they have negative connotations for either form of OA. Nor is it an option to re-appropriate the label “OA” for only one of the two forms of OA.
Stevan Harnad
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