Berlin Stonewalling -- or Flip-Flop

"1. Richard Poynder's take on Berlin 12 is basically valid (even though perhaps a touch too conspiratorially minded). 2. The much-too-long series of Berlin X meetings, huffing on year after year, has long been much-ado-about-next-to-nothing. 3. The solemn 2003 'Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities,' with its unending list of signatories, was never anything more than a parroting of the 2003 'Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing [sic],' which was, in turn, a verbose reiteration of half of the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative -- skewed toward only BOAI-II ("gold" open access publishing), virtually ignoring BOAI-I ("green" open access self-archiving). 4. For what it's worth, I attended Berlin 1 in Berlin in 2003 (out of curiosity, and in the hope it would lead to something) and we hosted Berlin 3 in Southampton in 2005 (at which it was officially recommended to require BOAI-I, green OA self-archiving, and to encourage BOAI-II, gold OA publishing -- exactly as had been recommended in 2004 by the UK House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology). 5. After Berlin 3 in 2005 the Berlin X series went on and on, year after year (I never attended again), but the progress on implementing the Southampton/Berlin-3 recommendations was transpiring (though still much too slowly) elsewhere (with the ROARMAP mandates being adopted in the UK, Australia, EU, and US, starting from 2003 and continuing today). 6. As far as I can tell, the Berlin X series just continues fussing about gold OA, and although I am less suspicious than Richard, I too suspect that the 'secrecy' was because the institutional reps attending Berlin 12 are trying to forge a common front for working out a gold-OA 'flip' deal with publishers. And my prediction, for reasons I've repeated, unheeded, many, many times, is that any such flip will be a flop."