In his recent article in Triple C, Jeffrey Beall claims among other things that "the OA movement is an anti-corporatist movement" (from http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/525/514).
In response, César Villamizar and I pulled some data from an open access article processing charge research-in-progress which illustrates that the portion of open access journal publishing that uses article processing charges (the segment that Beall focuses on in his work on predatory publishers) is heavily dominated by the commercial sector. All of the 14 largest publishers listed in DOAJ that have article processing charges (by number of journals published) are commercial in nature, to the best of my knowledge (if any are not-for-profit, correction would be appreciated). These 14 account for about half of the APC-charging journals listed in DOAJ. The full percentage of APC charging journals has not been calculated, however it would be more than 50% as there are many small publishers using this business approach that are also commercial in nature. Conclusion: Beall's characterization of this sector as "anti-corporatist" is not logical. To avoid confusion, please note: - The majority of journals listed in DOAJ - about two-thirds - do not charge article processing fees. - Open access publishing is just one of the two major approaches to open access, along with open access archiving. Details can be found on The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Eonomics: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2013/12/open-access-publishing-by-apc-dominated.html Beall's leap to this conclusion is most unfortunate as like many OA advocates I genuinely appreciate Beall's work on the quality of open access publishing and while I have many issues with this article, there are also points on which I would like to agree. best, -- Dr. Heather Morrison Assistant Professor École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies University of Ottawa 613-562-5800 ext. 7634 http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>
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