On 5-Nov-09, at 7:26 PM, Joseph Esposito wrote:
I don't want to comment further on DeepDyve's program as
I have a
relationship there, but I find Professor Harnad's
perceived irony
to be misplaced.
OF COURSE, people would find ways to monetize OA content.
What
did you expect? And if someone prefers to purchase
something
through "monetized OA" instead of going directly to the
free OA
source, why would anyone want to interfere with an
individual's
preference? I fail to see the virtue of the top-down,
mandated
policies that Professor Harnad supports.
The answer is simple: At the moment, OA's target content -- all 2.5
million articles published annually in the planet's 25,000 -- is
still 85% absent (i.e., not made OA by its authors). The mandates are
in order to get it self-archived, and hence made OA. The current bids
to "monetize" the existing OA content -- whether from OA journals or
from OA repositories -- are likely to reduce the momentum (from both
users and authors) to provide that missing OA content, as well as to
reduce the institutional and funder momentum to mandate that they
provide it.
That is a bad thing (for OA, and authors, and users, and their
institutions and funders, and the general public that funds much of
the research funding and for whose benefit that research is being
done).
But once all OA's target content is OA, I couldn't care less if
secondary vendors try to "monetize it" -- or users are foolish enough
to pay for it (since it is all already OA).
As for what is said below about books: nolo contendere. Refereed
journal articles (OA's primary target content) are all, without
exception, author give-aways, written purely for user uptake, usage
and impact, not for sales royalty income. Not so for books. So books
are irrelevant to the irony of the premature floating, touting and
uptake of $0.99 PPV at this time: jubilatio praecox.
Stevan Harnad
I recently did a survey of a segment of scholarly book
publishers
and stumbled upon an interesting practice. One publisher
sells
books directly from its Web site. All the titles also
appear on
Amazon. Amazon's prices are less expensive across the
board.
But the publisher continues to do good business from its
own
site. Why? Do we ban publishers from selling from their
own
sites and mandate that all sales go to Amazon?
Joe Esposito
On 11/4/09 3:39 PM, "Stevan Harnad"
<harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
Ahmed is quite right. This sort of re-use
comes with the
territory if one adopts a CC attrib license.
It's still ironic that OA content can be used
to promote PPV
which in turn slows the momentum for growth
of OA...
Stevan
On 3-Nov-09, at 6:04 PM, Ahmed Hindawi wrote:
I am surprised that Steven (or
anyone else for that matter) is
surprised that PLoS content is
available on the DeepDyve site.
All PLoS articles are published
under CC attribution license
(which does not prevent
commercial reuse), just like most
of the
major OA journals/publishers.
DeepDyve does not even need to
take
PLoS permission to index, host,
or even sell the material on
their web site. I am glad
DeepDyve is not charging for PLoS
articles (or Hindawi articles),
but if they did, they would be
within their legal rights and
would not need to get any
permissions from the publisher or
the authors (as the copyright
holders) in order to do that.
Ahmed Hindawi
On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 8:42 PM,
Stevan Harnad
<harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>wrote:
DeepDyve
- iTunes
comes to
Science
Publishing
http://j.mp/tZIdF
I'm surprised PLoS
would agree to
provide its content
as part
of the perks for a
pay-per-view scheme.
This gives "re-use" a
whole new dimension.
DeepDyve is of course
doomed (by OA), but
OA is going about its
inevitable destiny so
glacially slowly that
there's probably
time for a few bucks
to be made out of
this absurd scheme
(motivated by the
equally absurd
pricing practices of
classical
pay-per-view).
Just surprised to see
PLoS along for the
ride. (Since they
make
no money out of it,
it is presumably for
the sake of eyeballs,
but they're reaching
those current
eyeballs at the cost
of
prolonging the
darkness for far more
future ones. It's not
even
like a pay-to-pollute
scheme, in that it's
not self-limiting
but
self-perpetuating...
Stevan Harnad
Received on Fri Nov 06 2009 - 04:23:43 GMT