[Advocacy Advisors] non-free academic publishing licenses

Sat Jul 26 16:19:48 UTC 2014

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 at 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 at 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 at wikimedia.org>
>>> To: Advocacy Advisory Group for WMF LCA
>>>         <advocacy_advisors at lists.wikimedia.org>
>>> Subject: [Advocacy Advisors] non-free academic publishing licenses
>>> Message-ID:
>>>
>>> <CAM2wSz5503dZREk43hwMLer2udW7BE0C4AMyy8pOxiUDR_hBPw at 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-open-access-licences#
>>>
>>> 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
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jon Davies - Chief Executive Wikimedia UK.  Mobile (0044) 7803 505 169
>> tweet @jonatreesdavies
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> 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.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Advocacy_Advisors mailing list
> Advocacy_Advisors at lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/advocacy_advisors
>

-- 
Mathias Schindler
Projektmanager
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
web: http://www.wikimedia.de
mail: mathias.schindler at wikimedia.de

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