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The
movement is also actively imposing onerous mandates on researchers,
mandates that restrict individual freedom. 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 Opinion. 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. This
article initially published on Crawford W. (2014). Ethics and Access 1:
The Sad Case of Jeffrey Beall. Cites
and Insights, 14:(04), 1-22 |
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