Probably a little bit of both.
On the more-or-less innocent side, some academic institutions are genuinely worried about some "new" aspects of information reuse that this partially addresses, like data mining/data extraction. I think this is just a phase and they'll grow out of it, but we (free/open community) have not yet done a great job addressing why freedom to do data mining is important.
On the "pull the wool" side, this is damaging to interoperability and republishing - both of which are important to us and very scary to the publishing industry. So the publishers (and this is definitely an initiative from publishers) have a lot of incentive to constantly try to redefine "open access" until they can break it with those terms.
The letter we've been asked to join focuses primarily on the interoperability argument, which I think is appropriate for them; the blog post I'm thinking about would be more focused on intellectual freedom.
Luis
On Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 5:07 AM, Jon Davies jon.davies@wikimedia.org.uk wrote:
Would really be worth calling them out on this. Perhaps they are just Innocent or perhaps trying to pull the wool?
Message: 1 Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 14:27:18 -0700 From: Luis Villa lvilla@wikimedia.org To: Advocacy Advisory Group for WMF LCA advocacy_advisors@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Advocacy Advisors] non-free academic publishing licenses Message-ID: < CAM2wSz5503dZREk43hwMLer2udW7BE0C4AMyy8pOxiUDR_hBPw@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Hi, all-
An academic publishing group called STM (The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers) has published some "open" licenses that, well, aren't really open. In my reading, they fail both the OKFN's open definition and freedomdefined.org's definition, so would not be acceptable on Commons or other WMF projects.
Andrés Guadamuz has written about this more here:
http://www.technollama.co.uk/academic-publishers-draft-and-release-their-own...
I'm considering drafting a WMF blog post on this issue, because of the potential for confusion and the limitations on reuse[1]. I've also been made aware of a potential letter on the subject from a variety of related organizations that we'll consider signing on to.
This is not advocacy per se, since it is a private group and not a government, but I wanted to give you all a heads up in case you were asked about it by publishers or other people in the open access movement.
Have a great weekend- Luis
[1] We have piles of materials from legitimately open-licensed journals, like PLOS: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Media_from_PLOS_journals (seriously, I spent minutes clicking around in there and never got past the letter A, alphabetically)
-- Luis Villa Deputy General Counsel Wikimedia Foundation 415.839.6885 ext. 6810
*This message may be confidential or legally privileged. If you have received it by accident, please delete it and let us know about the mistake. As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal/ethical reasons I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For more on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer.*
On Jul 26, 2014, at 9:01, Luis Villa lvilla@wikimedia.org wrote:
Probably a little bit of both.
On the more-or-less innocent side, some academic institutions are genuinely worried about some "new" aspects of information reuse that this partially addresses, like data mining/data extraction. I think this is just a phase and they'll grow out of it, but we (free/open community) have not yet done a great job addressing why freedom to do data mining is important.
On the "pull the wool" side, this is damaging to interoperability and republishing - both of which are important to us and very scary to the publishing industry. So the publishers (and this is definitely an initiative from publishers) have a lot of incentive to constantly try to redefine "open access" until they can break it with those terms.
The letter we've been asked to join focuses primarily on the interoperability argument, which I think is appropriate for them; the blog post I'm thinking about would be more focused on intellectual freedom.
Luis
On Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 5:07 AM, Jon Davies jon.davies@wikimedia.org.uk wrote: Would really be worth calling them out on this. Perhaps they are just Innocent or perhaps trying to pull the wool?
Rather than being particularly confrontational, it might be better to address our own communit(y|ies) and thus address-by-reference academia and publishers.
If we write up a clear ruling on Commons, stating that any STM licenses or other licenses with STM riders are not free and may not be uploaded to commons, this addresses our contributors. A friendly blog article explaining exactly why these are not-free again addresses our community. And both can then be cited by anyone who wants point out to STM why these should not be promulgated.
From my own pov, letters and blog entries which come across as freevangelism are rarely used in discussions except among the choir members.
Amgine
On Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 9:12 AM, Amgine amgine@wikimedians.ca wrote:
On Jul 26, 2014, at 9:01, Luis Villa lvilla@wikimedia.org wrote:
Probably a little bit of both.
On the more-or-less innocent side, some academic institutions are
genuinely worried about some "new" aspects of information reuse that this partially addresses, like data mining/data extraction. I think this is just a phase and they'll grow out of it, but we (free/open community) have not yet done a great job addressing why freedom to do data mining is important.
On the "pull the wool" side, this is damaging to interoperability and
republishing - both of which are important to us and very scary to the publishing industry. So the publishers (and this is definitely an initiative from publishers) have a lot of incentive to constantly try to redefine "open access" until they can break it with those terms.
The letter we've been asked to join focuses primarily on the
interoperability argument, which I think is appropriate for them; the blog post I'm thinking about would be more focused on intellectual freedom.
Luis
On Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 5:07 AM, Jon Davies jon.davies@wikimedia.org.uk
wrote:
Would really be worth calling them out on this. Perhaps they are just
Innocent or perhaps trying to pull the wool?
Rather than being particularly confrontational, it might be better to address our own communit(y|ies) and thus address-by-reference academia and publishers.
If we write up a clear ruling on Commons, stating that any STM licenses or other licenses with STM riders are not free and may not be uploaded to commons, this addresses our contributors.
How does this process *work* at Commons? It's vaguely mysterious to me, but I'd love to learn more and would be happy to partner with someone here to do that.
(And completely agreed that the blog post would be better if it references something like this.)
Luis
On Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 10:00 PM, Luis Villa lvilla@wikimedia.org wrote:
How does this process *work* at Commons? It's vaguely mysterious to me, but I'd love to learn more and would be happy to partner with someone here to do that.
I guess publishing a well phrased proposal with a clear argumentation on https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Proposals would be the first step ...
Niko
Makes sense, and done: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Copyright#non-free_....
On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 2:30 AM, Nikolas Becker <nikolas.becker@wikipedia.de
wrote:
On Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 10:00 PM, Luis Villa lvilla@wikimedia.org wrote:
How does this process *work* at Commons? It's vaguely mysterious to me, but I'd love to learn more and would be happy to partner with someone here to do that.
I guess publishing a well phrased proposal with a clear argumentation on https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Proposals would be the first step ...
Niko
Advocacy_Advisors mailing list Advocacy_Advisors@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/advocacy_advisors
On Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 9:12 AM, Amgine amgine@wikimedians.ca wrote:
If we write up a clear ruling on Commons, stating that any STM licenses or other licenses with STM riders are not free and may not be uploaded to commons, this addresses our contributors. A friendly blog article explaining exactly why these are not-free again addresses our community. And both can then be cited by anyone who wants point out to STM why these should not be promulgated.
The real motivation for providing truly open access would be a Wikipedia policy of preferring such sources when the alternatives are otherwise equally good. How easy it is to find the articles of a given journal online has major effect on its impact factor, and referencing it often in Wikipedia makes it easier to find, both directly, and by external links in the Wikipedia article namespace being a factor in Google rankings.
Apparently there was an attempt back in 2007 to create such policy, but it was abandoned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Open_Access_(archived_proposal)
On Aug 2, 2014, at 20:25, Tisza Gergő gtisza@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 9:12 AM, Amgine amgine@wikimedians.ca wrote: If we write up a clear ruling on Commons, stating that any STM licenses or other licenses with STM riders are not free and may not be uploaded to commons, this addresses our contributors. A friendly blog article explaining exactly why these are not-free again addresses our community. And both can then be cited by anyone who wants point out to STM why these should not be promulgated.
The real motivation for providing truly open access would be a Wikipedia policy of preferring such sources when the alternatives are otherwise equally good. How easy it is to find the articles of a given journal online has major effect on its impact factor, and referencing it often in Wikipedia makes it easier to find, both directly, and by external links in the Wikipedia article namespace being a factor in Google rankings.
Apparently there was an attempt back in 2007 to create such policy, but it was abandoned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Open_Access_(archived_proposal)
I could imagine an entire digression on encouraging projects to use open access references. It's not always easy to find the open access editions of articles. Most of my partner's research is available via open access, but you'd never know that from google scholar[1].
On another point, having a policy at a given wikipedia supporting open access research (and a growing number of governments require publicly funded research be published open access - pretty much 100% of the US National Institutes of Health research for example) only affects that specific wiki. Nice, but it would be nicer if it were a translingual effort.
Amgine
[1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=Saewyc&btnG=&as_sdt=1%...
On Sat, Aug 2, 2014 at 10:18 PM, Amgine amgine@wikimedians.ca wrote:
I could imagine an entire digression on encouraging projects to use open access references. It's not always easy to find the open access editions of articles. Most of my partner's research is available via open access, but you'd never know that from google scholar[1].
I don't think that's fully appropriate for this list (both off-topic and we don't have the right people here), but I'm curious where else (if anywhere) such a discussion would make sense - wikimedia-l? Key village pumps?
On another point, having a policy at a given wikipedia supporting open access research (and a growing number of governments require publicly funded research be published open access - pretty much 100% of the US National Institutes of Health research for example) only affects that specific wiki. Nice, but it would be nicer if it were a translingual effort.
Again, slightly OT here, so maybe direct responses just to me, but I'm curious how folks think that might be done in a translingual way. As far as I can see, short of a board policy there isn't much way to create such a translingual policy. (We could, of course, hardcode certain open access sources for special treatment in the code, but that seems like an inelegant solution to me.)
By the way, for those of you interested in this and going to Wikimania, they've called open access "open scholarship" and there are quite a few interesting/relevant tracks, including: https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Marking_open-access_ref...
Luis
Hi everybody,
thanks for Luis for the pointer on the "free-as-in-closed" licenses from STM.
At the risk of slighly derailing this conversation, here's my 2 cents: The "open access" movement has in the past succumbed to the charms of a short term victory by selling off. In order to attract as many academics and institutions as possible, they have watered down the definition of open access many times, failing to reach the thresholds of "open" of neighboring groups (software, non-academic content). At the same time, they did not even attempt to make any enforcement effort to the term "open access". The common denominator of all the licenses used by journals in the Directory of Open Access journals (if those licenses could be found - I failed many times when I conducted a search around 2008 in preparation for a talk at a conference) was "it is online - or will be online in the future for some period of time".
It may sound a little harsh, but I consider the term "open access" to be broken beyond repair. Anything with that label may or may not be free, there is no informational value from this term and I fail to see anyone emerging that could improve the situation. If STM now publishes another broken non-open "open access" license, it is a pity but unable to make it substancially worse than it already is.
Mathias
2014-07-26 18:01 GMT+02:00 Luis Villa lvilla@wikimedia.org:
Probably a little bit of both.
On the more-or-less innocent side, some academic institutions are genuinely worried about some "new" aspects of information reuse that this partially addresses, like data mining/data extraction. I think this is just a phase and they'll grow out of it, but we (free/open community) have not yet done a great job addressing why freedom to do data mining is important.
On the "pull the wool" side, this is damaging to interoperability and republishing - both of which are important to us and very scary to the publishing industry. So the publishers (and this is definitely an initiative from publishers) have a lot of incentive to constantly try to redefine "open access" until they can break it with those terms.
The letter we've been asked to join focuses primarily on the interoperability argument, which I think is appropriate for them; the blog post I'm thinking about would be more focused on intellectual freedom.
Luis
On Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 5:07 AM, Jon Davies jon.davies@wikimedia.org.uk wrote:
Would really be worth calling them out on this. Perhaps they are just Innocent or perhaps trying to pull the wool?
Message: 1 Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 14:27:18 -0700 From: Luis Villa lvilla@wikimedia.org To: Advocacy Advisory Group for WMF LCA advocacy_advisors@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Advocacy Advisors] non-free academic publishing licenses Message-ID:
CAM2wSz5503dZREk43hwMLer2udW7BE0C4AMyy8pOxiUDR_hBPw@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Hi, all-
An academic publishing group called STM (The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers) has published some "open" licenses that, well, aren't really open. In my reading, they fail both the OKFN's open definition and freedomdefined.org's definition, so would not be acceptable on Commons or other WMF projects.
Andrés Guadamuz has written about this more here:
http://www.technollama.co.uk/academic-publishers-draft-and-release-their-own...
I'm considering drafting a WMF blog post on this issue, because of the potential for confusion and the limitations on reuse[1]. I've also been made aware of a potential letter on the subject from a variety of related organizations that we'll consider signing on to.
This is not advocacy per se, since it is a private group and not a government, but I wanted to give you all a heads up in case you were asked about it by publishers or other people in the open access movement.
Have a great weekend- Luis
[1] We have piles of materials from legitimately open-licensed journals, like PLOS: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Media_from_PLOS_journals (seriously, I spent minutes clicking around in there and never got past the letter A, alphabetically)
-- Luis Villa Deputy General Counsel Wikimedia Foundation 415.839.6885 ext. 6810
*This message may be confidential or legally privileged. If you have
received it by accident, please delete it and let us know about the mistake. As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal/ethical reasons I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For more on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer.*
On Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 5:01 PM, Luis Villa lvilla@wikimedia.org wrote:
The letter we've been asked to join focuses primarily on the interoperability argument, which I think is appropriate for them; the blog post I'm thinking about would be more focused on intellectual freedom.
Post (and letter) are up: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/07/new-open-licenses-arent-so-open/
Comments welcome.
Luis
publicpolicy@lists.wikimedia.org