Scholarly Open Access |
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
Home
About
About Us
Beall's
Beall's List
Support
Contact |
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
Seemingly
in order to promote commercial publishers, Mr. Beall despises the
asset that the SciELO collection represents, and makes factually incorrect
assertions. Contrary to his statements, the whole collection is already
indexed in the Scopus database. Also in opposition to another of his
mistaken affirmations, SciELO has adopted for some time the Creative
Commons license, which means that there is no risk of an article “losing
its interest” due to author’s copyright issues. One paragraph
in particular demonstrates the prejudices, classism, imperialism and crass
commercialism present in the tone of Mr. Beall’s diatribe: “Thus,
commercial publisher platforms are nice neighborhoods for scholarly
publications. On the other hand, some open-access platforms are more like
publication favelas.” As
a counterpoint to this neocolonial point of view, a recent article by
Vessuri and colleagues emphasizes the contribution of initiatives such as
SciELO and Redalyc (also targeted by Mr. Beall) to the development of
science in Latin America and the world: “In fact, Latin America is using
the OA publishing model to a far greater extent than any other region in
the world. Also, because the sense of public mission remains strong among
Latin American universities, the effectiveness of open access for
knowledge sharing was heard loud and clear. (…) These current
initiatives demonstrate that the region contributes more and more to the
global knowledge exchange while positioning research literature as a
public good.”2 Contrary
to the classist disgust that favelas elicit from Mr. Beall, we would like
to reiterate that they are a kind of neighborhood where a sizable portion
of the Brazilian population, which uses the nation’s healthcare system
and is ultimately the source of funding for the Brazilian science itself,
resides. Discrimination and prejudice against these Brazilian citizens is
inadmissible. If the only alternatives for scientific publishing are
either inhabiting the gated communities of the 1% of the world population
which concentrates wealth at the cost of exploiting the other 99%, or
being with the people in a favela, long live the favela. Article
initially posted on |
|||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||