Jeffrey
Beall - "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."
Like
this unfortunate fellow: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/09/how-journals-nature-science-cell-damage-science
I
wonder why Mr Beall chose to publish in an open access journal whose process of
peer review clearly misses basic errors? Proves his point about the risk to
quality, perhaps …
Regards,
Aran Lewis
Senior
Cataloguer and Repository Manager
Sheppard
Library
Middlesex
University
The
Burroughs
London
NW4 4BT
020
8411 2115
http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/
From:
Repositories discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: 10 December 2013 15:01
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Cameo Replies to Beall's List of Howlers
And now, a few deadpan
rejoinders to just the most egregious of Beall's
howlers:
"ABSTRACT: While the
open-access (OA) movement purports to be about making scholarly content
open-access, its true motives are much different. The OA movement is an
anti-corporatist movement that wants to deny the freedom of the press to
companies it disagrees with. 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."
There are two ways to provide
OA: Publish your article in an OA journal (Gold OA) - or -
Publish in any journal you freely choose, and self-archive your final
peer-reviewed draft in your institution's OA repository (Green OA).
"The open-access
movement isn't really about open access. Instead, it is about collectivizing
production and denying the freedom of the
press from those who prefer the subscription model of scholarly publishing. It
is an anti-corporatist, oppressive and negative movement, one that uses young
researchers and researchers from developing countries as pawns to artificially
force the make-believe gold and green open-access models to work. The movement
relies on unnaturalmandates that take free
choice away from individual researchers, mandates
set and enforced by an onerous cadre of Soros-funded European
autocrats…"
Green OA provides online
access to peer-reviewed research for all potential users, not just those ate
subscribing institutions.
With Green OA mandated, those who wish to continue paying subscriptions (and
can afford to) are free to keep on paying them for as long as they like.
Publish in any journal you freely choose, and self-archive your final
peer-reviewed draft in your institution's OA repository (Green OA).
"The open-access
movement is a failed social movement and a false messiah, but its promoters
refuse to admit this. The emergence of numerous predatory publishers – a
product of the open-access movement – has poisoned scholarly
communication, fostering research misconduct and the publishing of
pseudo-science, but OA advocates refuse to recognize the growing problem. By
instituting a policy of exchanging funds between researchers and publishers,
the movement has fostered corruption on a grand scale. Instead
of arguing for openaccess, we must determine and settle on the best model for
the distribution of scholarly research, and it's clear that neither green nor
gold open-access is that model…"
There are two ways to provide
OA: Publish your article in an OA journal (Gold OA) - or -
Publish in any journal you freely choose, and self-archive your final
peer-reviewed draft in your institution's OA repository (Green OA).
"Open access advocates
think they know better than everyone else and want to impose their policies on
others. Thus, the open access movement has the serious side-effect of taking
away other's freedom from them. We observe this tendency in institutional
mandates. Harnad (2013) goes so far as to propose [an]…Orwellian
system of mandates… documented [in a]
table of mandate strength, with the most restrictive pegged at level 12, with
the designation "immediate deposit + performance evaluation (no waiver
option)".
Publish in any journal you
freely choose, and self-archive your final peer-reviewed draft in your
institution's OA repository (Green OA).
"A social movement that
needs mandates to work is doomed to fail. A social movement that uses mandates
is abusive and tantamount to academic slavery.
Researchers need more freedom in their decisions not less. How can we expect
and demand academic freedom from our universities when we impose oppressive
mandates upon ourselves?…"
Publish in any journal you
freely choose, and self-archive your final peer-reviewed draft in your
institution's OA repository (Green OA).
(Perhaps a publish-or-perish mandate,
too, is academic slavery? Or a
"show-up-for-your-lectures-or-you're-fired" mandate? Or a mandate to
submit CVs digitally instead of in print? Or not smoke on the premises?)
"[F]rom their
high-salaried comfortable positions…OA advocates... demand that for-profit,
scholarly journal publishers not be involved in scholarly publishing and devise
ways (such as green open-access) to defeat
and eliminate them…"
Green OA provides online
access to peer-reviewed research for all potential users, not just those at subscribing
institutions.
With Green OA mandated, those who wish to continue paying subscriptions (and
can afford to) are free to keep on paying them for as long as they like.
If and when globally mandated Green OA makes subscriptions unsustainable, journals
will cut out inessential products and services (such as print edition, online
edition, access-provision and archiving) and their costs, and downsize to
providing peer review alone, paid for, per outgoing institutional article, out
of the institution's incoming journal subscription cancellation savings.
"OA advocates use
specious arguments to lobby for mandates, focusing only on the supposed
economic benefits of open access and ignoring the value additions provided by
professional publishers. The arguments imply that publishers are not really
needed; all researchers need to do is upload
their work, an action that constitutes publishing, and
that this act results in a product that is somehow similar to the products that
professional publishers produce…."
Green OA is the peer-reviewed draft. Subscriptions pay for peer
review today. If cancelled, the savings will pay for peer review (and any other
publisher product or service for which there is still a demand left, once Green
OA repositories are doing all the access-provision and archiving).
Beall, Jeffrey (2013) The Open-Access
Movement is Not Really about Open Access.TripleC Communication, Capitalism & Critique
Journal. 11(2): 589-597