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All
but one of those links are to items already discussed here; the Roy
Tennant post deals largely with a Beall piece attacking OCLC, and by
policy I don’t comment on OCLC, so I didn’t include Tennant’s piece
here. (Which does not mean I disagree with what Tennant’s
saying.) I was going to write a detailed response pointing out, among
other things, that Beall makes a number of outrageous claims about OA
advocates without referring to or citing any of them. There’s absolutely
no evidence presented that any OA advocates hold any of the
“anti-corporatist” (sic) views that Beall attributes to them, which
leaves the article as an eight-page rant against a straw man. Beall claims
that “a close analysis of the discourse of the OA advocates reveals that
the real goal of the open access movement is to kill off the for-profit
publishers and make scholarly publishing a cooperative and socialistic
enterprise.” Needless to say, the close analysis never comes. If it had
come, this article would be a serious contribution to the OA discussion
instead of an uninformative rant, especially if it had analyzed
representative passages from numerous OA advocates instead of
cherry-picking juicy but unrepresentative quotes from a handful of alleged
zealots. It wouldn’t have proved anything against OA itself,
but it might have made for a good read. [Emphasis added.] Consider
that final sentence. I can certainly find a few OA advocates who are
anti-copyright, but that doesn’t even begin to suggest that OA is
anticopyright. Even if Beall had some support for his claims about some
advocates, it wouldn’t prove a thing about OA. BT didn’t do a
detailed critique of the arguments because Michael Eisen did that.
Instead, he looks at the rhetoric. BT quotes a paragraph from Albert O.
Hirschman’s book The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity,
Futility, Jeopardy: I
have come up with another triad: that is, with three principal
reactive-reactionary theses, which I call the perversity thesis or
thesis of the perverse effect, the futility thesis, and the jeopardy
thesis. According to the perversity thesis, any purposive action to
improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only
serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy. The futility
thesis holds that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing,
that they will simply fail to “make a dent.” Finally, the jeopardy
thesis argues that the code of the proposed chafe or reform is too high as
it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment. BT
finds all three in Beall’s article, and explains that; his discussion is
worth reading directly. I’ll quote two paragraphs that seem very much on
the money, discussing three of the more outrageous sentences in Beall’s
piece (“Randian” refers to Ayn Rand, who BT calls a “Manichaen
apocalyptic novelist often taken for a political philosopher by teenage
boys”): This
makes some sense if you share a Randian worldview. In this comforting
worldview, the world is a simple place to understand. It’s filled not
with flawed human beings acting upon a variety of motivations trying to
make their way through a complex world. No, the world is made of heroes
and villains. The heroes are the people who think as I do and are always
right. The villains are any people who disagree with any part of my
ideology. They do so not because the world is complicated and disagreement
natural, but because they are evil and possibly stupid, and no matter what
noble motives they might claim to have, they’re lying and trying to
destroy some beloved institution. Also, there’s the faith that
commercial enterprise is always good and free markets (if they ever really
exist) always lead to the best outcome. Challenging this faith in any way
leads to an extreme reaction. It’s a world of extremes. Criticizing any
area in which private enterprise and free markets maybe don’t give us
the outcomes we want is equated with being a “collectivist” who wants
to bring the capitalist system down. That explains why in the article,
criticism of Elsevier or of commercial science publishing means that one
wants to destroy all corporations. It
doesn’t make a lot of sense until you look at it through the Randian
lens. In this world, people don’t support open access because they think
the creation and dissemination of new knowledge is a public good. They do
it because they want to destroy all corporations and deny freedom to
people. This must be their motive because they disagree with Beall about
open access scholarship, and he thinks these things are bad, so they must
be motivated by these evil ideas. Q.E.D. Since there have to be heroes and
villains, Beall must be the hero and everyone who disagrees with him in
the slightest a villain who is acting from evil motives to destroy
everything he holds dear. Once you share this worldview, evidence
doesn’t matter anymore. There’s
a lot more here—it’s not a brief post. Go read it. I like BT’s
syllogistic version of part of Beall’s “reasoning”: Some
OA publishing is predatory publishing. All predatory publishing is bad.
Therefore, all OA publishing is bad. Sounds about right—not, to
be sure, as a valid syllogism. Characters The
open-access movement has always had its… characters. Zealots. Kooks.
Scary people. People who just Aren’t Our Sort, Dearie. Any old loon can
start a weblog, after all; at least one Loon has done so. For all the
differences the Loon has with some of OA’s other characters, she stops
short of wishing them gone. It takes a certain amount of kookiness to
provide energy sufficient to get anything done sometimes. Moreover,
engaging publicly with kookery is often a fool’s game, at best analogous
to teaching pigs Mozart arias, at worst lending kooks credibility they do
not deserve and should not be permitted to have. So OA tolerates its
kooks, usually with kindness, sometimes with a politely blind eye or deaf
ear… Why
did OA let Beall get away with his act so long? no
one has yet asked, probably because the answer the Loon has just
given is so patently obvious to those in the movement as not to
need saying. (If the Loon had to characterize the attitude of those
in the OA movement who noted Beall’s deep-seated antipathy
toward OA months or even years previously— evidence was available
for the persistent and perceptive—she would say it was “oh,
him, he’ll blow himself up someday.” As, in fact, he has.) Nonetheless,
there is a lesson in this that the movement could do with taking to
heart: do not let your enemy control a visible, high-mindshare product
or service in your space. If not for Beall’s list, Beall
would never have been anything but another easily-ignorable kook.
If a suitable group of individuals, or an organization, had
taken on the job of publicly calling out bad practice, Beall would
have sunk back into easily ignorable kookdom. Instead, we have…
this, whatever this is; “embarrassing evitable mess” is the Loon’s
first instinctive characterization. The Loon will mercilessly mock
and possibly savage any commenter waltzing in here with “oh,
well, nobody actually believed Beall; he had no real influence.”
That is arrant nonsense, and the greatest pity is that it is
arrant nonsense spouted by those most deeply steeped in the OA
movement and most desirous of its success. If
the above paragraph describes you, the Loon loves you dearly—you know
she does!—but must remind you that people like you are so few as to
be fringe still. It often does not feel so on Twitter, true,
but academic Twitter itself is a rounding error compared to all of
academe. You cannot measure what academe understands by what you
understand, nor how academe gets its news by how you do. (You use a
feedreader? You digitally-brainwashed solutionist kook, you.) In
the Loon’s prior professional world, Beall’s list was an enormously
valuable convenience, and because of that, Beall himself enjoyed
considerable credibility, such that his least pronouncement was freely
email forwarded everywhere. Every now and then this was plainly passive
aggression against the Loon herself (she has mentioned how deeply her
prior workplace loathed her and all her works, correct?), but by and
large, it was ignorance crossed with homophily among librarians to whom OA
and its advocates felt like a threat. The Loon’s workplace was no sort
of outlier—well, except insofar as many, many academic libraries still
boast insufficient knowledge of or interest in OA to bother forwarding
communiqués about it. Those
OA advocates who wonder why libraries are not more active in the OA
movement need wonder no more. The Loon boggles particularly at one
currently- circulating notion that academic libraries will just take over
scholarly publishing wholesale. Not in an environment where Beall’s
frothings circulate as freely as water churned up by migrating flocks of
waterfowl! Fortunately, the Loon can’t think of any other major OA
showpiece services run by OA’s enemies. (OA and hybrid journals at
toll-access publishers are insufficiently influential to count at this
juncture.) We can at least hope that an analogous situation will not arise
again. If it does, though, let us please intervene earlier. Keep
what is valuable about such services by all means, but let us not allow
their proprietors to fuel further apathy and anti-OA agitation. I
quoted that in its entirety because I suspect most readers don’t click
through on most links and because it’s relatively short. I wish I could
say “yes, but…” but I can’t: There’s simply too much evidence, even
now, that Beall’s held in high regard and OA is viewed
suspiciously—not only among academics but among too many librarians and
even library journalists. I will disagree with something the Loon
says— although in a response to a comment, not in the piece itself:
“If academe had found him out, he would have quickly been laughed to
scorn (as has now happened).” Unfortunately,
as such examples as a January 2014 link from ALA Direct to the
latest Beall’s List demonstrates, the scorn hasn’t happened effectively.
The first link is to Distraction Watch, a community archive of
strange emails from probably-sketchy publishers. It’s no substitute for
stronger action from OASPA and others, but it’s an interesting piece of
the puzzle. Source:
Crawford, W. (2014). Ethics and Access 1: The Sad Case of Jeffrey Beall,
Cites & insights, 14(4), 1-22. |
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