I'll let more notorious OA advocates (named or unnamed in the article) point
out the many flaws and weaknesses in Beall's article (if they think it's worth
the effort).
What strikes me though is that it looks much more like an opinion piece than a
scholarly paper; the distinction is important, as the appropriate reaction is
quite different in the two cases.
But I'd like to point out one specific statement : < OA advocates [...]
ignor[e] the value additions provided by professional publishers >.
This is quite strange, because almost all OA advocates value, and want to
maintain at least one of these additions, the most important in my opinion:
peer reviewing. Maybe the OA advocates I know are not those whom Beall refers
to, but the article doesn't allow us to tell, except for a few, notably
Harnad, curiously one of the most vocal defenders of peer-reviewing in the OA
movement.
There is also much irony in this statement, considering the fact that Beall
published his article in an OA journal that doesn't seem to add much value: no
formatting, no copy editing ("we ask authors to use our Layout template and
take full responsibility for their own proofreading"
http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/about/editorialPolicies). As to the
peer-reviewing of Triple-C, if I were to follow Beall, I would probably
conclude that it constitutes evidence that even non-predatory OA journals
(Triple-C charges no author fees) are doing a bad job at it. But I won't.
Marc Couture
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