SH: The Heidelberger Appell is all based on pure misunderstanding.
MS:It is indeed. Reuss is not talking about journal articles. He says he is not even talking about OA. He says that he "does not want to be forced to publish" his works (classics editions, in his case) [books] in any form other than what he chooses himself. Why does he say that? Because he apparently had the experience that one of his funders demanded that a classic edition he was going to publish in cooperation with a mid-size book-publisher be made OA a year after publication. The publisher said he would not produce the book under these circumstances.
SH:Matthias, first, thanks so much for at last discovering and revealing the original source of the misunderstanding!
Second, it is still Reuss's fault, for having immediately launched a petition that made this scattershot attack on all forms of free online access without taking the trouble to see and separate what is benign and desirable from what is not (and what is and is not OA's target).
Third, it sounds as if the fault here lies also partly with the research funder too....Books are a far more complicated, far less uniform, and far less urgent case insofar as OA is concerned.....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/10/2009 12:17:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
