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To boost the open-access movement, its leaders sacrifice the academic futures of young scholars and those from developing countries, pressuring them to publish in lower-quality open-access journals. The open-access movement has fostered the creation of numerous predatory publishers and standalone journals, increasing the amount of research misconduct in scholarly publications and the amount of pseudo-science that is published as if it were authentic science. Say
what? First there’s the odd suggestion that there is one thing called
“the OA movement.” Then there’s the suggestion that the OA
movement—not the NIH and Congress, not university faculties—is
somehow imposing “onerous mandates.” Since the article
is itself OA, you can download the PDF and read it yourself. It’s
pretty astonishing, and I hesitate to quote much of it because I don’t
want to be confused with The Onion. Consider this blanket
claim about (all?) OA advocates: “OA advocates want to make
collective everything and eliminate private business, except for
small businesses owned by the disadvantaged.” While I’ve called
myself an OA independent, by Beall’s lights I am doubtless an
advocate—and have been involved for 24 years, far longer than
he’s been critiquing. My interest in general collectivizing and
eliminating large private businesses is nonexistent, which I
strongly suspect is true for most OA advocates. We
are also told, “The open-access movement is a negative movement
rather than a positive one. It is more a movement against something
than it is a movement for something.” That’s also nonsense: it
is a movement for access to scholarly research. We also hear
that “the gold open access model actually incentivizes corruption.”
Oddly enough, given that Big Deals generally trap libraries
into maintaining subscriptions to journals they would otherwise
cancel, Beall claims just the opposite: “Publishers always had
to keep their subscribers happy or they would cancel.” He
takes a swipe at the Semantic Web (which he says is dying a slow
death) for reasons that I can’t fathom, except that it allows him
to call OA “the ‘Semantic Web’ of scholarly
communications.” I’ll quote another bit here—but with the
prefatory information, admittedly repetitious, that a higher
percentage of subscription journals charge author- side fees, typically
called page charges, than the percentage of OA journals that charge
article processing charges. That’s
important, given this: Money, a source of corruption, was absent
from the author-publisher relationship (except in the rare case
of reasonable page charges levied on authors publishing with non
profit learned societies) in the traditional publishing model. Ask
scholars about those “reasonable page charges” and how
they’re only levied by non-profit societies sometime. You may get
an earful. Beall
claims that “only a few publishers” employ the gold OA model
ethically—and that most of those are cutting corners and lowering
standards. He’s gone beyond raising alarms about “predatory”
publishers to general condemnation of gold OA (published in a gold OA
journal). I confess to not going through the whole nine page article
carefully; I lacked the stamina to deal with it. Rather than doing my own
fisking of an article that appears to deserve paragraph by paragraph
refutation, I’ll turn to other commentaries. The issue must have
appeared in late November or early December 2013; the reactions mostly
appeared in mid-December. Source:
Crawford, W. (2014). Ethics and Access 1: The Sad Case of Jeffrey Beall,
Cites & insights, 14(4), 1-22. |
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