Peter Suber has replied to my general request for the definition of strongOA. (It got lost in the comments queue, as has also happened to StevanH :-):
Hi Peter.
Just one point of clarification. As I said in my blog <a href=“http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/04/strong-and-weak-oa.html”>post</a> on Tuesday, “there is more than one kind of permission barrier to remove, and therefore…there is more than one kind or degree of strong OA.” BBB OA is definitely strong OA, but not all strong OA is BBB OA.
As soon as we move beyond the removal of price barriers to the removal of permission barriers, we enter the range of strong OA. Hence, an article with a CC-NC license is strong OA because it allows some copying and redistribution beyond fair use (even if it doesn’t allow all copying and redistribution). My own preference is still for the CC-BY license, but we shouldn’t speak as if CC-NC were not strong OA or as if there were just one kind of strong OA.
PMR: This is very useful. At this stage I simply want to find out where the dividing line is. Not whether it should be drawn there. So if Suber-Harnad strongOA includes CC-NC, then that’s part of the definition.
It’s essential that our community decides how to draw the boundary. It’s not like a healthy-unhealthy spectrum – there should be a clear dividing line between strongOA that we all know how to operate. Because otherwise we end up with debates about what we mean, rather than what we want to do about it.
The first question, then, is how do we distinguish strongOA from weakOA. The Peter and Stevan have given principles, and I now need algorithms to determine how to apply them.
A good starting point is to take the current labels and major OA publishers or OA journals and see if we agree. We have to agree.
In passing I am surprised that this announcement has not generated more discussion. I think it’s one of the most important OA events this year (after, say, NIH and SCOAP3). It’s critical that for all of and more of :
- librarians (who are going to have to manage it)
- funders (who want to know what they are paying for)
- authors (who worry about their rights
- and information-seekers like me who want to know what they can do with the data
So please start commenting. Give us examples of strongOA, and no-so-strong, …
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.
But since Peter 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.”
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
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
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
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.
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.
BTW: I agree to license my comments here under the the Creative Commons Attribution-license (default is NonCommercial).
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