[Advocacy Advisors] non-free academic publishing licenses

Sat Jul 26 16:12:49 UTC 2014

On Jul 26, 2014, at 9:01, Luis Villa <lvilla at 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 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?
> 
> 

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
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