I apologize for dwelling on what to some members of the GOAL
forum and the JISC-Repositories list may seem to be minor or
irrelevant points. I would like to suggest that they are far from
being minor or irrelevant, but go to the very heart of what OA is,
what it's for, and how to make it happen:

On 2012-05-09, at 1:19 PM, Jan Velterop wrote:

> Of course the need for access isn't. What I'm
> saying is that just 'gratis' OA won't feel much
> like meaningful access to those who have to
> ingest amounts of papers that are impossible
> to ingest by unaided (by machine) reading.
> This is an interesting article that illustrates that:
> http://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c6815
> (not OA, unfortunately)

Jan, I think your reply does not address the
question I asked.. You made what looks like a
spurious dichotomy, between those who can
afford sufficient access and those who can't keep
up with the relevant literature.

That does not cover the relevant options.

There are those who can afford sufficient access
and those who cannot. And for those who cannot
afford sufficient access, providing Green Gratis OA
is most definitely providing "meaningful" access.

For those whose problem is not access but tools
to help them keep up with the relevant literature
-- note that this is not an access problem but a
filtering/alerting/search/navigation problem --
one can develop solutions without any reference
to OA. In fact, publishers and secondary indexers
will be happy to provide such services on the
full non-OA corpus. Publishers would be delighted
to form a consortium to help users navigate paid
content (in fact they are already beginning to do
it) -- especially if we would just stop the clamor
for OA (Gratis OA!).

So what is really at issue is whether Green Gratis OA
is indeed not "meaningful" enough to warrant "lowering
 the bar" in order to mandate it.

According to Jan, it is not.

According to me, it most definitely is: in fact, it is the
first and foremost reason for providing OA at all.

What do other GOAL and JISC readers think?

(I am also willing to make a bet that once Green
Gratis OA mandates from institutions and funders
have generated enough OA content to make it worth
their while, a generation of bright doctoral students in
computer science and scientometrics will be more
than happy to provide filtering and navigation tools
beyond Jan's wildest dreams. And so will Google.
All that's missing is that Green Gratis OA content
that Jan does not find meaningful enough... See
citebase for the faintest of foretastes (crafted by
a Southampton doctoral student, Tim Brody, also
the architect of ROAR, and limited only by the
sparseness of OA content):
http://www.citebase.org/ )

Stevan Harnad

>
> Jan
>
> On 9 May 2012, at 18:12, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>
>> No, the need for access is not a dichotomy between those who can afford to
>> access all articles they need and those who cannot afford the time to read
>> everything:
>>
>> The need for access is for those who cannot afford to access all articles
>> they need.
>>
>> That's the (currently unfilled) need that Green Gratis OA fills.
>>
>> (It's only publishers who keep telling researchers they already
>> have all the access they need.)
>>
>> Stevan Harnad
>>
>> On 2012-05-09, at 12:09 PM, Jan Velterop wrote:
>>
>>> What we may be seeing here is a dichotomy between researchers that can afford to read much of what they have to take in, simply because there isn't an enormous 'overwhelm' of papers in their field, and those who cannot possibly read everything they ought to take in, because they are constantly confronted with precisely such an 'overwhelm' of papers. The latter need to have alternative ways of getting the gist of the information that's being published in their field, even if simply to judge which fraction of the published literature they actually do need to read with their own eyes. Machine-aided techniques, such as text-mining and text-analysis, which can 'ingest' and analyse many more articles than a single human can, are essential in such fields, and only getting more important.
>>>
>>> Open Access should not be reserved just for the former class of researchers, the ones who are in a position to read all the literature in their fields with their own eyes.
>>>
>>> Jan
>>>
>>>
>>> On 9 May 2012, at 16:43, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Wed, 9 May 2012, Jan Velterop wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> The real issue is to do with usage rights.
>>>>
>>>> Usage rights are moot if you don't have access.
>>>>
>>>>> There may be technical issues to overcome, but there
>>>>> is scant reason to overcome those for so-called OA
>>>>> articles if text-mining is not allowed.
>>>>
>>>> Perhaps the reasons are not so scant for all those
>>>> researchers who are currently denied access
>>>> (irrespective of whether "text-mining is [or is]
>>>> not allowed"...).
>>>>
>>>> Stevan Harnad
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>>>
>>>
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>