Last night, I got a message from Joseph Kraus, the Collections & E-Resources Analysis Librarian at Penrose Library, University of Denver. He’s asking several open-access advocates (of which I am one) to answer a set of seven questions for a study that will investigate institutional activities and personal opinions concerning open access resources.

Last time, we looked at what the term “open access” actually means. We noted that its been widely abused, so that when you need to be specific about the full meaning you need to say “BOAI-compliant”; we recognised that much of what is described as OA is really only “gratis OA”, or as Ross Mounce called it, “gratis access”; and we noted that the term “libre open access” is literally meaningless and should be avoided.

I’m going to keep this free of advocacy. Hopefully everything I say here will be uncontroversial, because all I am doing is surveying definitions and clarifying distinctions. I’ll save my opinions for later articles (not that there is any secret about them). Open access (or OA) It may seem a bit surprising to have to define “open access” when we’ve all been talking about about constantly for a year.

Alexandre Fabre recently bought a French-language comic-book, Les Dinosaures by Plumeri and Bloz, and found this in the third volume: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-7059 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“7059” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/11/12/un-sauropode-aux-jambes-musclees/brontomerus-2/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/brontomerus.jpeg” orig-size=“679,364” comments-opened=“1”

I think I figured out what the core, immutable quality of science is. It’s not formal publication, it’s not peer-review, it’s not “the scientific method” (whatever that means). It’s not replicability, it’s not properly citing sources, it’s not Popperian falsification. Underlying all those things is something more fundamental. Humility. We all know that it’s good to be able to admit when you’ve been wrong about something.

One of our anatomy students this year, Tess MacFife, was inspired by the other Dr. Wedel’s skull lecture and produced this excellent anatomy-inspired jack-o-lantern: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-7042 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“7042” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/11/01/your-sphenoid-is-disturbingly-bat-like/sphenoid-pumpkin/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/sphenoid-pumpkin.jpg”

If you’ve been following Twitter or the blogs, you’ll know that this has been Open Access Week. It’s been great to see many new open-access policies announced this week [Ireland, Belgium, Hungary], to read important explanations of why fully open (CC BY) OA is the way to go, and to see discussions from people like clinicians and librarians. It all contributes to the glorious sense that the transition to OA is beyond the tipping point.

Four things: 1. From the start of 2013, the Royal Society is abandoning issues for its journals ( Proc. B , Phil. Trans. , Biology Letters and more) and moving to a continuing publishing model — as already used for their open-access journal Open Biology . Excellent news: in a post-print world, issues achieve nothing but the imposition of arbitrary delays.

Back in July I wrote an open letter to Wiley, asking them to use the Creative Common Attribution licence for their open-access activities. They sent two brief notes in response — one from Director of OA Rachel Burley, and the other from STM Publicity Manager Jennifer Beal. Both are appended to my original post. Unfortunately, I dropped the ball in following this up — my apologies to Rachel and Jennifer.

When you start a blog, the natural thing is to want to feel that you’re in control of it, and that means controlling what can be posted there.  But that’s a mistake.  Moderation means that people can’t see their own comments, which is alienating; but more importantly, it means other people can’t see them, which in turn means that all discussion grinds to a halt until such time as you happen to moderate.

Another blast from the past: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-6988 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6988” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/10/18/2000-ads-flagrantly-plagiarised-brontosaurus/2000ad-prog-10-back-cover-flesh-card-game-brontosaur/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2000ad-prog-10-back-cover-flesh-card-game-brontosaur.jpeg” orig-size=“522,344” comments-opened=“1”