David Goodman gives a very fair and accurate summary of our interactions in the AmSci Forum (though I would not have said that some were unfriendly -- just impatient, on my part; and if anything, I'm even more impatient now that another half-decade has gone by and we still don't have universal OA!).
Regarding the Wikipedia entry for OA, I would add only that the proof is in the outcome: Yes, I had no choice but to let things take their natural course with the "Open Access" entry, as David and Peter urged. And yes, it did become "Open Access (publishing)." But, the result is that now the widespread misconception that "Open Access" means "Open Access Publishing" -- it does not -- is all the more widespread and entrenched, thanks to that natural "echo-amplification" outcome in Wikipedia.
If someone considers that to be some sort of a triumph or vindication on behalf of something or other, I have no idea what that something is! Wikipedia has simply served as a megaphone for amplifying misinformation in this case.
So much for conflating OA with OA publishing.
I would say it's not at all accurate to say that I oppose OA publishing ("Gold OA"): I don't. (In fact I am pretty sure it will eventually prevail, and have been saying so since the very beginning.) I simply assign it a different priority, in time, importance, urgency, causality and potential, relative to OA self-archiving ("Green OA") at this time, for very specific, concrete, practical, evidence-based reasons (which I will not rehearse here).
I also don't, didn't, and never aspired to "own" the OA entry in Wikipedia. It was written by many people long before I knew about it, and before I contributed portions to a few of its subsections (the ones on Green OA and Institutional Repositories). I occasionally look at those sections still, but I largely stopped trying to fix them any more when my edits were repeatedly over-ruled on several points in which I felt that the Wikipedia outcome was just plain wrong.
But nothing about OA is rocket science, and the only thing hanging in the balance is more lost time... The outcome itself is obvious, optimal and inevitable -- just long overdue.
Yours impatiently,
Stevan Harnad http://openaccess.eprints.org/ http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h...
On Sat May 15 23:06:14 David Goodman wrote:
Some background:
When I was a librarian open access was one of the principal things I
worked on. Stevan has been for over 10 years an acknowledged leader
in this field, and his propaganda for open access has been a key
factor for the considerable success it has had--by now all major US
and UK granting agencies require it or are about to do so. All of
us who use academic material are very much indebted to him, for I do
not think it would have happened to anywhere near this extent without
him.
But Stevan is very much set on his own preferred way of doing this.
His way is good, but he thinks that only his way is good--to the
extent that he has often tried to argue against other ways, even
though they differ only in detail, and most of his activism in the last
few years has been against other open access advocates. (I am, as you
gather, one of the people who thinks other ways are at least as good
or possibly better, and I have had many public & private discussions
about this with him over the years, not all of them friendly. ).
There are two basic methods:
One is known as "Gold" open access, publishing by open access
publishers in journals that are free to the reader, the costs being
paid through some form of direct or indirect subsidy from the author,
his institution, his granting agency, or other financing arrangement.
(Familar examples of this are PLOS or BMC).
The other is known as "Green" open access, publishing in journals in
the conventional way, but also putting the articles, or at least
unedited drafts of the manuscript, into a repository. There are two
types: using a centralized repository , either on a nationwide or
subject-wide basis (the familiar examples of which are PubMed Central
in biomedicine and arXiv in physics), or alternatively on an
institution-wide basis (good examples are Harvard's DASH or Stevan's
own repository at Southampton, ECS )
The only form Stevan supports is institutional repositories. (For
reasons, I refer you to his many long postings on American Scientist
Open Access Forum , which he moderates in accord with his own views.)
He opposes the term open access publishing because it suggests "Gold"
Open Access publishers.
When I joined WP three years ago, I found that Stevan was exercising
OWNership over the WP article on open access, which almost totally
focussed on institution-based repositories and referenced a great
number of his own writings. When I and other made changes, Stevan
always reverted them.
Stevan attempted to get his form of the article fixed by personal
intervention with an eminent open access supporter very close to his
own views who was a member of the WMF Advisory Board, and I believe
also with Jimbo. I am also a professional acquaintance of that
supporter, an extraordinarily fair-minded person trusted by everyone
dealing with the subject at all, and between us in personal discussion
with Stevan we were able to convince Stevan to let community processes
deal with the article.
As phoebe says, the current wording is reasonable.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org