> Yes, you are misconstruing my position:

In case anyone cares, Stevan and I had a private exchange that clarified
this.  In that communication, I asked Stevan whether it was fair to say
that he thinks "that when a publisher offers Open Choice, that's okay --
but when a group of publishers, acting as a lobby, promotes Open Choice
as a formal alternative to self-archiving mandates, then that's a
problem."  He said yes.  I maintain that that's different from what he's
been saying in the public forum, but whatever.  (He did invite me to
share the clarification on-list.)

As for one other important point (the definition of OA):

> No, Rick, that's the BOAI definition, and that was where the
> word OA was coined:
>
>     http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml

Actually, the Barcelona definition departs significantly from Stevan's.
It does not require content to be either peer-reviewed or formally
published in order for it to be considered OA, nor does it share
Stevan's narrow focus on self-archiving.  More significantly, the BOAI
definition is itself not the only one.  See also the Berlin Declaration
at http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html (which does
not even mention peer review) and the Bethesda Principles at
http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/bethesda/.  All three of these
formal definitions differ somewhat from each other, and none of them is
as restrictive as Stevan's.

Why waste so many keystrokes on this point?  Because this whole argument
has been about whether particular OA solutions should or shouldn't be
supported by our community.  Stevan has a personal and specific vision
of what OA should be, and there's nothing wrong with that -- except when
he pushes it as the One True Doctrine of OA and then tries to enlist
everyone else's help in actively opposing OA solutions that he deems
heretical.  I suggest that the range of acceptable OA options is
significantly broader than he thinks, and that we should push back when
individuals push us towards an unnecessarily (and counterproductively)
narrow vision of this issue.

----
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
(775) 784-6500 x273
rickand@unr.edu