Thank you, Paige. Some further perspective on my comment "the open access movement has developed a habit of viewing all feedback / critique as anti-open access and reacting defensively, as if every critic were an enemy" reflects the history of the OA movement. There has been substantial opposition to OA, and in the early days there were few advocates. There still is opposition, just less opposition and a great many more advocates and practitioners.
Actual opposition often took the form of partial agreement. One form of argument used early on, whether as deliberate deception or as wishful thinking, was the argument that OA simply was not happening. I don't recall the exact details but I remember sometime around 2003 or 2004 there was a discussion about OA in a UK government context where one publisher said (in November) there were no new OA journals created this year and the BioMedCentral rep pointed out that BMC alone had created 11 new journals so far that year. DOAJ has served an invaluable function over the years as documentation of the existence and growth of OA journals. For this reason, I have used DOAJ for macro level numbers on the numbers and growth of OA journals in my series The Dramatic Growth of Open Access since about 2005. Data can be downloaded from here: https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/dataverse/dgoa Until recently, I posted a quarterly update on my blog The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics. Today I am at the office and am blocked from accessing my blog. I see this as an early indication of a likely rising problem for OA. That is, as internet security concerns are noted and addressed, other OA works could be blocked as well. This ongoing documentation of the growth of OA was intended to help OA advocates see the advances and not just the daily hard work, to counter the disappointment of the occasional backsliding journal with a focus on the ongoing momentum. I continue to collect and share data, but don't do the commentary regularly anymore, because I think it's no longer necessary. OA journals face significant challenges from the ease of flight-by-night commercial operators setting up scam journals and making a profit by charging authors. This is the reason for DOAJ's "get tough" policy. In my opinion, the OA movement still has work to do to address this problem. One of my projects is a longitudinal study of OA journals. When DOAJ discards journals and publishers, I don't. For this reason, I see that some of the largest publishers I track are "no longer in DOAJ" but appear to still be active, while as noted earlier in this thread, exclusion of small independent journals with a good reputation for scholarly quality is problematic as well. This is important because this is a side-effect of the author-pays model and a reason to consider other models for OA journal support. To summarize, OA advocates and initiatives have faced opposition, even attacks. It is not surprising that we (yes, me too) have tended to become defensive. Old friends may seem puzzled by my dramatic change from the regular announcement of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access to my current critical stance. This is not an attack, and no need to be defensive. Rather, it is my assessment that OA has come of age. 20 years ago, the term "open access" had not yet been coined. Librarians had not begun to dream about what their roles might be in an open access future. Today there are thousands of OA journals and publishers, so many OA policies that (as Poynder's interview with Edith Hall notes), a researcher's work might fall under multiple OA policies, and "scholarly communications" and/or "open access" have become a significant part of the work, and sometimes the job title, of librarians. OA is becoming the default; it is time to move beyond advocacy to developing and refining policy, services and practices for the future. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 ________________________________ From: goal-boun...@eprints.org <goal-boun...@eprints.org> on behalf of Mann, Paige <paige_m...@redlands.edu> Sent: Wednesday, August 21, 2019 2:20 PM To: goal@eprints.org <goal@eprints.org> Subject: Re: [GOAL] DOAJ: handmaiden to despots? or, OA, let's talk Attention : courriel externe | external email While I fully appreciate concerns that "DOAJ does what it can with the resources it has (and it does all this very well", applaud, and benefit from DOAJ, I also appreciate Heather Morrison's thoughtful reflections that raise questions and concerns. Others may share her thoughts, but may be less likely to raise them in such a public forum. DOAJ and others can address these challenges (as they are able to do so) and perhaps raise a stronger base of support. In response to Jean-Claude question, "Are these the most important questions presently facing open access and open science?" There is no right answers to this question and I've been finding Heather Morrison's posts thought-provoking as they draw attention to the impacts of our work on people and policies. I'm sure I'm not alone in this as critical reflections should inform our work and our communities of practice. I am also curious to learn more about Heather's statement that "the open access movement has developed a habit of viewing all feedback / critique as anti-open access and reacting defensively, as if every critic were an enemy." Would you mind saying more about this? As for Heather's questions, "Why is DOAJ asking question about preservation services?" and "Why is DOAJ asking about technical matters such as article download statistics and time from submission to publication?" If these responses are included as search facets, I can see these fields being rather valuable to researchers looking to publish their work OA. At the very least, speaking as someone with a lot less experience and knowledge (about DOAJ and schol comm in general) than Morrison, Guédon and others, I do appreciate constructive contributions, though they may get contentious at times. Respectfully, Paige Paige Mann Scholarly Communications Librarian | STEM Librarian University of Redlands, USA ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2019 16:54:32 +0000 From: Gu?don Jean-Claude <jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca> Subject: Re: [GOAL] DOAJ: handmaiden to despots? or, OA, let's talk To: "goal@eprints.org" <goal@eprints.org> Message-ID: <d09efb31-7dcb-6014-8938-f6f412cc4...@umontreal.ca> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" Some responses in the body of the text, in blue Jean_Claude Gu?don On 2019-08-21 11:41 a.m., Heather Morrison wrote: [snip] Some examples, given that both DOAJ and small independent journals have limited resources: * Why is DOAJ building a searchable article database if it is not clear that this makes any sense as a discovery tool for content? To me, this makes a lot of sense and looks pretty clear. * Why is DOAJ asking question about preservation services e.g. LOCKSS, National Archives? Academic libraries have been at the forefront of the open access movement - shouldn't this be their responsibility rather than the journals / DOAJ? Why not ask countries about National Archives rather than DOAJ and the journals? IFLA has advocated for OA; this seems a good fit for IFLA. DOAJ may well want to limit itself to journals that seem to have a clear idea of how they should be preserved over the medium to long term. It is a mark of professionalism. * Why is DOAJ asking about technical matters such as article download statistics and time from submission to publication? If you want to make sure that you are dealing with legitimate journals, it may be useful to know that its articles are downloaded fairly regularly and at some significant level. The same is true about delays in publishing. And, finally, what is wrong with DOAJ asking for a few more details to gain a better understanding of the set of journals they deal with? [snip] My main question remains: why take on DOAJ modus operandi (not to mention its handling of Egyptian journals)? Are these the most important questions presently facing open access and open science? I think not! _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
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