In reply to Cameron Neylon.

thanks, Cameron, for replying at length. I realize it takes time to engage in this way, and we both want it to be productive.

To me these discussion help explore both the immediate topic of Open Access, and larger questions of how we (one) might discuss anything. As I've written about in, e.g. "Collaborative Argumentation and Advocacy"(01 June), I'm as or more interested in doing pattern recognition on this debate around Open Access, and see it as a case study in evolving, mixed scholarly/public/engaged inquiry.

It's a somewhat unique case of a public policy/philosophical matter impacting, at once, a wide cross-section of academics and scholars, where we can look at different ways it gets argued and engaged with, and perhaps learn from this for future scholarly communication and open peer review. So, what other might call getting into the weeds, I call ethnography..

To me, the OA situation raises intriguing questions such as: can, should, or how might scholars/scientists/publics engage in such a debate, in a scholarly/scientific/public manner? and what expertises might or should be considered most useful? As you not, you get distrusted for being a "mere scientist"; and me, not a scientist, and so on; as I see it, we all have just pieces of the picture, so what might we do about that?

You've also constructed a straw man rather than following my argument through.

I am sorry it appears so to to you. I might also push back on this slightly, though, and ask, what does that really say? It's inevitable that no respondent perfectly represents the other position as the other person sees it, and so to some degree we are always debating a "straw man," it's just a question of to what degree and with what good-faith effort to counteract. I'd say the point of a reply is not, as you suggestively put it, for me to "follow your argument through"; it's to create a productive angle of incidence, and help build a scaffold of inquiry.

The point of a dialog, I believe, is not merely to address precisely the arguments you understand yourself to have made in your post, but to present counterpositions, both responding to you and incorporating other references and directions, so we possibly end up somewhere other than where we started. If it becomes my job to strictly follow your argument, then it isn't a dialogue. Not a problem, as long as you're perfectly sure you're in the right place already.

I would at least observe that in this thread and by general habit, I do just about everything I can to find appropriate references, quotations, names, and data to support, or support more exploration on, what I say. I try not to use language of aggression like "you've attacked me," "short-tempered," "I'll push back hard," etc. -- although admittedly, aggression has many forms and dialects -- or claim anything I can't evidence. I also, in this case, began my response by summarizing what I understand to have been your key points, for the precise purpose of helping you or any other reader consider how well I've understood you, and attempting to keep my response well engaged with yours. Normal "mirroring" and context-bridging methods.

You seem to be objecting that I refer to statements or matters outside your article, but forgive me -- you're a public figure, I've read and heard a lot of material from and about you. Also, let's not forget, I know you: other readers might not realize, but we've met and spoken at length on a number of occasions, and we have many mutual acquaintances. I contribute to PLOS's Article-Level Metrics initiative, have attended many events and hackathons at PLOS, and the last 3-day ALM workshop, and am so far invited and registered for the next one in October, hope to see you there, and to remain invited, etc..

On this specific question of defining "Open Access," you'll recall that in March we both were part of an extended Twitter conversation about this, with a whole set of prominent voices including BioMed Central's co-founder Matthew Cockerill and founding director Jan Velterop, John Wilbanks formerly of Science Commons, David Mainwaring of Sage Publishers in social sciences, Martin Paul Eve of Open Library of Humanities, et al. I gathered and published the whole public conversation, with comment, in a post "Is the definition of Open Access closed? leaders debate language strategy."

My point in tracking and republishing such engagements is exactly to foster and preserve patterns of good engagement between diverse and sometimes clashing views. And pronounced those views were. It started with my tweet of Wilbanks' Nature article "Licence restrictions: A fool's errand" and in which he called for Open Access to refer only to BOAI-compliant, CC-BY licensed publishing. Creative Commons tweeted a quote from the article, "Licences that distinguish between kinds of reuse... fail every definition of open access."

Wilbanks followed by taking, as Defoe said, the shortest way with dissenters, suggesting my approach was to "pervert the term open access," and "OA=defined. Don't like? Define a new term." You tweeted: "I'm with @wilbanks #openaccess is free & immediate access with no restrictions on re-use except reqrmnt for attribution cf #BOAI." Finally, just when I thought it was safe to go back in the water, Peter Murray-Rust at Cambridge followed up with a blog post that concludes, pronouncedly, "A: Open access [defined strictly as BOAI-compliant, CC-BY] means people can live and make a better planet. Not-A: Closed access means people die." Not to put too fine a point one it.

As I think you are aware, the effort to control how the term "Open Access" is used -- specifically to oppose its use for non-BOAI / CC-BY publishing -- is widely articulated by you and other OA advocates, sometimes quite bluntly. That's a larger, but not at all hidden context.

you've constructed an ad hominem argument against the post you think I wrote.

An ad hominem argument would, by definition, be about a person and not about a post, whether represented correctly or not. I would respectfully disagree that I attack you rather than your statements, or make primarily ad hominem rather than real arguments. Anyone can reread my post and see that my every step references a statement by you or an outside reference. (in fact, to acknowledge one of your/our causes, a text-mining / analytics tool could be used to "read" the post and characterize its argumentation type and level, so potentially we could let the Machine decide that one).

There isn't a single point in that post where I say what someone should do in any given case

See above. In the March conversation I curated and reposted, you publicly chimed in to agree with John Wilbanks who'd just said that to use 'Open Access' for non-BOAI-compliant cases is to "pervert" it, and "OA=defined. Don't like? Define a new term." In your last comment post you say rather forcefully, "appropriate the term...and I'll push back hard." How is that not saying what someone should do?

framing and assuming my position on small businesses, and knowledge or cultural enterprises, or independent scholars. Indeed you've assumed my position on these rather than asking what it is.

sorry, where/how? I discussed a hypothetical of how publishing/licensing options might look from the perspectives of a non-STEM publishing startup or cultural entrepreneur etc.; I didn't say anything about any position of yours on these cases. It was suggesting the exercise of imagining what an "open state of mind," in your title's terms, might be from those other perspectives. This is quite far from being ad hominen or speaking for you.

I, with a small number of others, with limited resources are trying to tackle some of the largest corporate lobbyists in the world - the ones making it harder for the independent scholar, or the small enterprise to develop its own economic sustainability and restricting access to existing knowledge and resources. Diluting the potency of the political message makes it harder for us to get good policy in place and makes it easier for the legacy incumbents to obfuscate and slow down the transition.

Yes, I am well aware of the pitched battle with incumbent publishers; and incumbents' proclivities for stalling, recuperation, lobbying, misrepresentation, language politics, etc., in this as in other fields. I'm not exactly of the incumbent stripe or to the manner born myself, as it happens. Also, I'm familiar with a lot of these companies and organizations, and people at them, from working full-time in the scholarly publishing industry for a lot of years, in startup and not-for-profit and university and consultant contexts; so I've seen a few tricks.

I respect the project of battling incumbents' reactionary tendencies, and consider that it's generally a way to "fight the good fight of faith," as it's put in my namesake book of the Bible, Timothy 6:12. But to be blunt, if I or anyone else decides we're not in agreement with your approach, for whatever reason -- why should we follow it?

appropriate a term that is defined tightly and carefully within the intellectual tradition that I am part of...and I'll push back hard

First, I'd ask the same question I did of William Gunn in my comment July 11, 2013 at 10:04am: what kind of broad consensus around your definition can you demonstrate, countering the long list of opposing evidence I give such as the usages of Peter Suber, Stevan Harnad, Wikipedia, RCUK, Wellcome Trust (non-CC-BY Open Access policy on monographs), NIH, and hundreds of organizations globally and their policy documents listed in ROAR?

Second, let's say you did demonstrate this point. It would still leave open the question of why a usage defined "within the intellectual tradition [you are] part of" would have any normative or persuasive power over anyone who doesn't consider themselves part of or bound by that tradition? People such as, apparently, me and many humanities scholars, entrepreneurs, publishers, cultural institutions, and libraries (see the "Library License" model, for example, proposed by Digital Public Library of America and the Harvard Library Innovatioj Lab).

No matter how important or true you consider your project to be, it's your project, and the brute fact is that generally it's nobody else's job to serve your project. If it's not also or helping their project, they'll probably be at best secondarily supportive, more likely indifferent and uncognizant, and possibly quite opposed if it has any possibility of harming their project or if they're threatened or affronted in any way. "It's important to me and my tradition and my goals" is simply not an argument; nor is "If you don't do as I say, I'll push back hard": that doesn't engage me, persuade me, or suggest respect other than that of a combatant. Even if you're not ultimately concerned about my opinion, you're conversing in public here, and potentially signaling to many other people how you might respond to their viewpoints.

If I may offer my own observation from the field, I've been working on humanities/social-science Open Access advocacy for some time, and have heard from many humanists, particularly in the UK, who feel more pushed around than engaged by the people they've seen calling themselves Open Access advocates. They may or may not particularly identify or agree with incumbents publishers and learned societies, etc., but these are at least the devils they know and who talk their language, while they may feel regularly alienated and scorned by many of the prominent advocates in the regular & social media.

The opinions I'm relating here are those of scholars, professors, deans, publishers -- not generally an ignorant horde. If that is the face of Open Access advocacy, in these fields I'd say it has a rather long and unnecessarily difficult road ahead.

What is to be done?
what might one do, what strategies? First and obviously, coalition. Plenty of factions and movements decide to coordinate with others they care for little or not at all, because it's a net benefit over not aligning. As I've suggested to Mr. Gunn, I even think in this case we have powerful principles of open knowledge supplying a great big tent-pole for a big-tent approach. It's not nearly so bad as, say, your typical Parliamentary coalition or child's second birthday party.

Second, because clearly I am not one to put my voice first.. I think's it's valuable to look at how movement veterans operate and communicate. For example, I've been following Stevan Harnad and Peter Suber, in particular, for over ten years now, and have observed how after playing key roles in and signing the BOAI declaration, and being extremely engaged in debate, by 2008 they had both publicly decided to support usage of / definition of "Open Access" for broader cases than just the BOAI-compliant. Harnad, obviously, has been a strong proponent of transitional practices like "Green OA" (yes, deprecated, I know), and Suber moved to a terminology of "gratis" and "libre" variants of open access, rather than a single definition.

Meanwhile, another key advocate, John Willinsky (now at Stanford) in his work and book The Access Principle focuses on articulating underlying principle to bridge different specific specfic approaches of perhaps varying adherence to or interpretation of those principles.

So from my perspective, it appears to be the strict-BOAI / CC-BY wing that is appropriating the term "open access" by insisting on a single and specific definition that clearly is not shared by much of the movement. I'm not telling people they can't use their own interpretation or definition; I'm being told that, e.g. by Wilbanks and you. Even if you're not concerned that your view differs from mine, I'd say, perhaps you might reconcile it with those of Willinsky, Harnad, Suber, Wikipedia, RCUK, or Wellcome, i.e. the authorities which most everybody else looks to?

But ultimately, I don't particularly want or see the need for this, because I think that in the big picture we basically agree and have much better things to work on together. For example, your blog post before this one was a guest post from the makers of the "Open Access Button" for gathering OA usage/denial-of-access data via Web browsers. This is closely related to ideas of "demand data collection" which I wrote about in my post "Six Paths to a global Open Access Repository" just a month ago. Clearly, we are thinking along many of the same lines, and looking to innovate, build, and not just discuss or dispute, so let's do that.

I'm reminded of a remark made by humanities scholar and recent Modern Language Assocation president Michael BeÌrubeÌ in his 2003 essay "The Utility of the Arts and Humanities" (PDF), discussing humanities and sciences: "we should adopt the long view...from which disputants like Kant and Hume...can be seen to be working opposite sides of the same street."

You and I may have disjunctive dispositions and worldviews, perhaps related to primarily scientific vs primarily humanistic outlooks, but the difference of position we have on this matter of Open Access is, frankly, so small that it would take some time and difficulty to even explain it to somebody new to the topic. I don't see that it's necessary to man the barricades, when we've on the same street, going the same direction, just on different sides of the street.

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@tmccormick tjm.org Palo Alto, CA