Dear Mr Harnad, It has taken me some days, even though I had been gently warned, to digest your mail and to compose a response.
Without any doubt, you have been an important and long time actor of and around open access. I am indeed a newcomer to this list, but not completely a newcomer to the subject. I admit that I know much better free software (and have learned and don't like the very confusing words "open source software" that I never use ... partly becaue I can always say that in case of doubt, my language is French that express better my views with "logiciel libre"), that I have known and worked with for more than 20 years. I am basically a teacher. I have been for the last 30 years. I have taught (mainly) physics and computing science to people from 7 till 77 (the ones reading Tintin ;-). For me, the process of learning as much as the one of teaching, is difficult. It requires a lot of energy, time and patience, on both sides. And there is no good way, equally good for everyone. For every teacher and learner. Every situation is new, different, with its own difficulties. This GOAL mailing list contains probably a very high concentration of people who know OA much better than me, and have done so for much longer than I have. And we can read that even for these people, some important definitions around OA (eg. green and gold) are NOT the same. Interestingly. I also know that the number of people who have never heard of OA, or have such a bad and weak idea of OA, even in the limited world of academics, around the Universities and research institutions, is probably much larger than the number of specialists and informed people. I therefore would conclude that the efforts of education around OA is large and important. One of the way I often comes down to when teaching is using the clear wording and definitions, the best I can find, using my own and personnal judgement. As well as explaining with differents words. Today, I find that the wording "green OA" and "gold OA" are not self-explanatory. In other word, I consider that the words "green" and "gold" do not mean anything by themselves and need further explanation. If they are not confusing ! For me, this situation is not the best to explain the OA case and need for OA. And it will probably lead to further mails like mine that will upset you. ... And block the discussion, as expressed by some people on the list. This is sad in a world where most people still need to be educated, in general and surely about OA and all its subleties. I sometimes wonder if I wo not prefer the simple word "free access". With free meaning both gratis and libre (freedom), this encompasses what Jean-CLaude Guédon says OA is "gratis and free access" With respect to "contibuting to OA instead of discussing about OA", I personnally like to think about "free knowledge" (not only research), being both gratis and libre, and I am proud to be the initiator and one of the actors of the Digithèque Pierre Gilbert, (see http://digitheque.ulb.ac.be/fr/digitheque-pierre-gilbert/ ) a place where all works by my grand-father are available online freely. He was a poet, an historian (aegyptologist and art historian), academician, curator of the Belgian Museum of Art and History ... I am the initiator and main actor of 2 digithèques to be inaugurated on October 17 and 25 in the presence of leading Belgian people, from the academic and research world, but NOT ONLY, about https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Roberts-Jones and https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Sterling whose works will be published online under the CC-BY-SA licence. There are also other ways I consider I contribute to OA and free knowledge, or free culture. For example by numerous personnal contacts. I hope to continue, also on this list, to contribute to a peacefull world where more knowledge is available freely to anyone, without any barrier, where people are willing to educate one another. Best regards, Nicolas Pettiaux Le 2015-08-14 18:28, Stevan Harnad a écrit : > Perhaps it’s time for our newcomer, Nicolas Pettiaux, to stop posting > for > a while and do a little reading to inform himself about OA and its > (short) > history. Otherwise he is just making us recapitulate it for him. > -- Nicolas Pettiaux, phd - [email protected] Open@work - Une Société libre utilise des outils libres _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
