Apology to Maxine Clarke and Nature

I have been over-brusque and apologize to Maxine Clarke who has pointed out:

I understand from your post above that you feel my response listing open publications and products is too fuzzy and does not match with what you have been writing in the past few weeks, but frankly I was not responding to anything you have written in the past few weeks, I was responding to your request to give examples of NPG's "open access" or "free" material. I think you are blowing my response out of proportion because it did not happen to fit into however you have been defining the terms of the discussion. It is your perogative to define terms however you like, but not your perogative to enforce other people to use the same definitions – I know what I mean by "open" or "free" content and I don't need to be told off by you for having a different definition to whatever your definition is — similarly, you are welcome to your own views and I shall not castigate you for them in a blog posting

I read her comment as replying to the large amount of material I have posted here illustrating the problems of deciding what is meant "open access". (This matters because it is something that many publishers charge authors for). The uncritical use of "open access" to define a wide range of information products in the industry is very unhelpful. Maxine was unaware of my previous and continuing concern about the need to define this precisely – I was unaware that she was not continuing the debate.
Occasionally this issue raises strong feelings 🙂