suber

=Peter Suber's Materials=
 * Open Access Overview (short and long) - Dr. Peter Suber (all** //**italics**// **are his quotations;** bold **statements are my analysis).**
 * [|http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm]**
 * [|http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm]**

// "OA journals conduct [|peer review]." **Clearly, some critics must believe that this scholarship isn't peer reviewed, else a statement wouldn't need to be made.**// //"OA archives do not perform peer review."// //"OA archives can contain preprints, postprints, or both."// //"OA journals typically let authors retain copyright." **Again, if a statement like this is necessary (and it is), there must be some thought by critics that OA authors lose copyright (and they don't).**// //"OA archives can provide OA by default to all their contents or can let authors control the degree of accessibility to their works." "Authors need no permission for preprint archiving. When they have finished writing the preprint, they still hold copyright. If a journal refuses to consider articles that have circulated as preprints, that is an optional journal-submission policy, not a requirement of copyright law. (Some journals do hold this policy, called the Ingelfinger Rule, though it seems to be in decline, especially in fields outside medicine.)"// //"The most useful OA archives comply with the [|Open Archives Initiative] (OAI) protocol for metadata harvesting, which makes them interoperable. In practice, this means that users can find a work in an OAI-compliant archive without knowing which archives exist, where they are located, or what they contain. (Confusing as it may be, OA and OAI are separate but overlapping initiatives that should not be mistaken for one another.)"// // ////**I am not sure what to do with this information, but it might be important later:**// //"Some OA journal publishers non-profit (e.g. [|Public Library of Science] or PLoS) and some are for-profit (e.g. [|BioMed Central] or BMC)." "For a list of OA journals in all fields and languages, see the [|Directory of Open Access Journals]." "OA archives can be organized by discipline (e.g. [|arXiv] for physics) or institution (e.g. [|eScholarship Repository] for the University of California)."
 * 1) The problem, as identified by Dr, Suber in his newsletter ([|http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/09-02-04.htm#progress]) is that //"////more than ever before I'm hearing the complaint that the term "open access" doesn't have a firm, common definition. This is not true, but it could become true if dilution and misuse of the term continue.//" **Certainly, a discussion of the rhetoric of OA (and Open Source Science (OSS) is crucial. He addresses this alleged confusion by citing the "BBB definition"; //"//**//The [|Budapest] (February 2002), [|Bethesda] (June 2003), and [|Berlin] (October 2003) definitions of "open access" are the most central and influential for the OA movement. Sometimes I call refer to them collectively, or to their common ground, as the [|BBB definition]."// **A history of solidarity exists, and it will be interesting to explore the breakdown in rhetoric leading to the "misuse of the term."**
 * 2) Dr. Suber's definition is most useful: //"////Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions." (short overview) and "//OA removes //price barriers// (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) and //permission barriers// (most copyright and licensing restrictions). //The// [|//PLoS//] //shorthand definition —"free availability and unrestricted use"— succinctly captures both elements" (long overview).// Dr. Suber also discusses the ideas that everyone agrees that OA is free, but there is some discussion about access rights; //"////There is some flexibility about which permission barriers to remove. For example, some OA providers permit commercial re-use and some do not." **Dr. Suber addressed some of my questions via email about use and distribution;**// "//The three components of the BBB definition differ slightly on which permission barriers must be removed and which may remain. The same goes// //for the preferences of OA activists: some want to permit commercial reuse and some don't; some want to permit derivative works and some don't (even when all agree that OA requires removing some or most permission barriers). My view is that OA is and ought to be flexible about this. In January 2002, speaking of commercial reuse, I put it this way: "I now lean// //toward permitting commercial use. But I want to make this preference genial, or compatible with the opposite preference, so that the [OA] movement can recruit and retain authors who oppose commercial use."// [|//http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-30-02.htm�31�//]
 * 3) **Further, Dr. Suber talked about the PLOS definition and helped clarify it, as well: "**//I support PLoS' call for "unrestricted use" even though PLoS and I both think that OA is compatible with using copyright law to protect the integrity of a work and enforce attribution. If you interpret "unrestricted use" as removing literally every usage barrier, then it would require assigning work to the public domain, which neither PLoS nor I think is required. If you interpret it as a call for removing most restrictions,or even all restrictions that hamper scholarship, then it's a good shorthand description."// **Dr. Suber makes an important distinction here in noting that "assigning work to the public doman" is not necessary, but that "a call" exists to remove "most restrictions, or even all restrictions that hamper scholarship." Herein might exist the roots of misunderstanding (misuse) of the term OA. PLoS is not requiring "unrestricted" use, but has established a framework, or a call, for eliminating barriers to published scholarship.** **This is an important section of the article, I think, because the words "free of charge" can be muted by commercial uses of OA materials, and, therefore, PLoS's notion of "unrestricted use" might be misinterpreted by critics. Dr. Suber points out that OA doesn't just mean "free." There are instances where commercial use is appropriate or acceptable. A further point to research be to note how many OA materials are restricted through CCL. My suspicion is that the major restriction will be "non-commercial" versus "commercial" use of material. However, in some instances, like UsefulChem, the results are clearly marked for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. Might this be a marker of differentiation between OS and OA?**
 * 4) Another important distinction in Suber's defintion is that //"////In addition to removing access barriers, OA should be immediate, rather than delayed, and should apply to full-text, not just to abstracts or summaries" (long).// **This distinction is essential to the OA movement; as the purpose of OA is to cut down the time it takes to publish crucial research by making it free and accessible. In OSS, real time publication of experimental data is only done by the UsefulChem project. There seems to be an disparity there, as organizations claim to be OA but are not publishing real time experimental or raw data. This calls into question the terminology of "immediate" "full text" and "summaries."**
 * 5) **OA is possible in the academy because authors do not receive monetary compensation for their work in the traditional publishing format, and, thus, lose nothing;** //"////In most fields, scholarly journals do not pay authors, who can therefore consent to OA without losing revenue. In this respect scholars and scientists are very differently situated from most musicians and movie-makers, and controversies about OA to music and movies do not carry over to research literature."// **However, tenure/promotion systems rely on publishing in "closed" texts, and questions about the acceptance of OA materials is, at best, controversial since some departments do not believe OA is "as good" or "as scholarly" as closed journals. It would be interesting to find persons denied tenure positions or promotions because of OA work.****There is a false notion that OA means that work is not peer reviewed; that isn't always the case. In some instances, like UsefulChem, Chemists without Borders, and Synaptic Leap, scientists are publishing various levels of raw data (open source) for the purposes of shared collaboration. These experiments are not peer reviewed, but build upon the community of knowledge available about a reaction/experiment. However, academic articles, the ones that would typically make it to a journal should be peer reviewed; //"//**//OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance." **I wonder if there is a struggle to find OA reviewers? Do reviewers see OA publications as "less than" academic?**//
 * 6) **There are two ways OA information is shared. The first is through archives and repositories; //"//**//do not perform peer review, but simply make their contents freely available to the world. They may contain unrefereed preprints, refereed postprints, or both. Archives may belong to institutions, such as universities and laboratories, or disciplines, such as physics and economics."// **The second is Peer Review Journals that //"//**//perform peer review and then make the approved contents freely available to the world. Their expenses consist of peer review, manuscript preparation, and server space.//"
 * 7) Dr. Suber discusses the Creative Commons License as //"One easy, effective, and increasingly common way for copyright holders to manifest their consent to OA is to use one of the// [|//Creative Commons//] //licenses. Many// [|//other open-content licenses//]//will also work. Copyright holders could also compose their own licenses or permission statements and attach them to their works."// Persons who hold such licensing //"////consent in advance to the unrestricted reading, downloading, copying, sharing, storing, printing, searching, linking, and crawling of the full-text of the work. Most authors choose to retain the right to block the distribution of mangled or misattributed copies. Some choose to block commercial re-use of the work. Essentially, these conditions block plagiarism, misrepresentation, and sometimes commercial re-use, and authorize all the uses required by legitimate scholarship, including those required by the technologies that facilitate online scholarly research.////"// **I was not familiar with other open-content licenses. I will need to explore them fully to see how they compare to CCL and if the wording of these licenses leads to confusion of the concept.**
 * 8) **An interesting concept is Dr. Suber's use of the term, "Royalty-free literature." In his email, Dr. Suber corrected my misunderstanding of the term (see discussion notes 2). I would like to focus, as Dr. Suber does, on //"//**//taxpayer-funded research."// **This excludes sensitive materials, patent materials, and work-for-profit-publishing materials.**
 * 9) **The focus of this research is to identify where terminology breaks down in defining OA/OS scholarship. My suspicion is that is doesn't break down within the movement, but critics of the movement don't fully appreciate what OA is what OA does. Some points that Dr. Suber makes about journals and repositories:**
 * "**OA literature is not free to produce or publish." **Dr. Suber discusses the concept of free publishing, and, no, the literature is not free to produce or publish. But, as he says later, OA is not a "business model" it is, rather, an "access model"**

"Journals that do not wish to convert to OA, or to provide their own OA content, can still support OA by permitting their authors to deposit postprints of their articles in OA archives." "The OA project is constructive, not destructive." "Promoting OA does not require the boycott of any kind of literature, any kind of journal, or any kind of publisher. Promoting OA need not cause publisher setbacks, and publisher setbacks need not advance OA. To focus on undermining non-OA journals and publishers is to [|mistake the goal]." "Open-access and toll-access literature can coexist. We know that because they coexist now. We don't know whether this coexistence will be [|temporary or permanent], but the most effective and constructive way to find out is to work for OA and see what happens to non-OA providers, not to detour from building OA to hurt those who are not helping."
 * There is a disconnect or a competition between "closed" and OA Journals; critics believe that OA will ruin the business of "closed" journals:**
 * Even though there are barriers (see below), "**////there's no reason to hold off using the term "open access" until we've succeeded. Removing price and permission barriers is a significant plateau worth recognizing with a special name."////


 * An important point that Dr. Suber makes is that** "Open access is not synonymous with universal access." Barriers exist;// "Filtering and censorship barriers//. Many schools, employers, and governments want to limit what you can see.// Language barriers//. Most online literature is in English, or just one language, and machine translation is very weak.// Handicap access barriers//. Most web sites are not yet as accessible to handicapped users as they should be.// Connectivity barriers//. The digital divide keeps billions of people, including millions of serious scholars, offline."//


 * Open Access is a way to share information. It is, as Dr. Suber says, "**//a kind of access, not a kind of business model, license, or content.//" **However, this varies by discipline, and this wil be the focus of my research. I want to look at Open Source Science with the Open Access Scholarship movement.**