Thanks for alerting us to this article, Stevan. Wacky indeed! Some preliminary observations:
Commercial scholarly publishing is arguably not a free market; it is a monopoly. The industry has, for example, been the subject of investigation by the UK Office of Fair Trading. The current tenure system forces scholars to publish in high-impact journals, regardless of the cost to the university system. This is a cost to scholars too, as paying high prices for journal subscriptions means less money for universities to use for other purposes - such as hiring junior scholars. If there is a managerial mandate impacting scholars with respect to scholarly publishing that interferes with academic freedom, this is it. Scholars who would prefer to publish in OA journals cannot make the choice because of the tenure process. One remedy for this particularly relevant for university administrators and senior scholars is the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment: http://www.ascb.org/dora/ The open access movement is global in nature and includes people involved in about ten thousand journals and over two thousand repositories. What is common to all open access advocates is a commitment to open access to scholarly publication. Beyond that we have as diverse a set of perspectives as any other group; some of us are relatively left-wing, others relatively right-wing. My own perspective is that there is a place for the corporate sector, however the primary purpose of scholarly publishing is to advance scholarship and the public interest. Profits to publishers are a socially useful side-benefit to the system, unless the push for profits becomes a priority over the needs of scholarship, which I argue is currently the case. It may be worth noting that the two largest and arguably most successful OA publishers to date (BioMedCentral and Hindawi) are professional commercial publishers, and PLoS, while not-for-profit, is also a professional publishing operation. Like Harnad, I am concerned that Beall's wild assertions in this article will obscure some of his observations which have some validity. I do not condone predatory practices by any publisher, and I support providing good advice to scholars about where to publish. However, good options for publishing - sometimes the best option - increasingly includes many high quality open access journals. Reference U.K. Office of Fair Trading. (2002). The market for scientific, medical and technical journals No. OFT 396 U.K. Office of Fair Trade. Retrieved September 13, 2011 from http://www.oft.gov.uk/advice_and_resources/publications/reports/media/ 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> On 2013-12-09, at 10:04 AM, Stevan Harnad <amscifo...@gmail.com<mailto:amscifo...@gmail.com>> wrote: Beall, Jeffrey (2013) The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access<http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/525/514>. TripleC Communication, Capitalism & Critique Journal. 11(2): 589-597 http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/525/514 This wacky article is going to be fun to review. I still think Jeff Beall is doing something useful with his naming and shaming of junk OA journals, but I now realize that he is driven by some sort of fanciful conspiracy theory! "OA is all an anti-capitlist plot." (Even on a quick skim it is evident that Jeff's article is rife with half-truths, errors and downright nonsense. Pity. It will diminish the credibility of his valid exposés, but maybe this is a good thing, if the judgment and motivation behind Beall's list is as kooky as this article! But alas it will now also give the genuine "predatory" junk-journals some specious arguments for discrediting Jeff's work altogether. Of course it will also give the publishing lobby some good sound-bites, but they use them at their peril, because of all the other nonsense in which they are nested!) Before I do a critique later today), I want to post some tidbits to set the stage: JB: "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." JB: "[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... JB: "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…. JB: "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 unnatural mandates that take free choice away from individual researchers, mandates set and enforced by an onerous cadre of Soros-funded European autocrats... JB: "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... And then, my own personal favourites: JB: "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)". This Orwellian system of mandates is documented in Table 1... JB: "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?..." Stay tuned!… Stevan Harnad -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SPARC OA Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to sparc-oafo...@arl.org<mailto:sparc-oafo...@arl.org> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sparc-oaforum+unsubscr...@arl.org<mailto:sparc-oaforum+unsubscr...@arl.org> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/a/arl.org/group/sparc-oaforum To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sparc-oaforum+unsubscr...@arl.org<mailto:sparc-oaforum+unsubscr...@arl.org>.
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