Jan, you may well be right. Certainly we will have to give up some of what we hold dear (pun not intended!) in the old system, if scholarly communication to cope in future. The losses may be even more drastic - who knows? Sally Sally Morris South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU Tel: +44 (0)1903 871286 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk
_____ From: Jan Velterop [mailto:velte...@gmail.com] Sent: 10 December 2013 14:37 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Cc: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk Subject: Re: [GOAL] Re: Pre-publication peer review (was: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List) Sally, May I join you in the ranks of those who risk being pilloried or branded heretics? I think the solution is clear. We should get rid of pre-publication peer review (PPPR) and publish results in open repositories. PPPR is the one thing that keeps the whole publishing system standing, and expensive in monetary terms, but also in terms of effort expended. It may have some benefits, but we pay very dearly for those. Where are the non-peer-reviewed articles that have caused damage? They may have to public understanding, of course (there's a lot of rubbish on the internet), but to scientific understanding? On the other hand, I can point to peer-reviewed articles that clearly have done damage, particularly to public understanding. Take the Wakefield MMR paper. Had it just been published without peer-review, the damage would likely have been no greater than that of any other drivel on the internet. Its peer-reviewed status, however, gave it far more credibility than it deserved. There are more examples. My assertion: pre-publication peer review is dangerous since it is too easily used as an excuse to absolve scientists and science journalists from applying sufficient professional skepticism and critical appraisal. Doing away with PPPR will do little damage if any at all to science, but removes most barriers to open access and saves the scientific community a hell of a lot of money. The 'heavy lifting is that of cultural change' (crediting William Gunn for that phrase), so I won't hold my breath. Jan Velterop On 10 Dec 2013, at 13:36, Sally Morris <sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk> wrote: At the risk (nay, certainty) of being pilloried by OA conformists, let me say that whatever ithe failings of his article I thank Jeffrey Beall for raising some fundamental questions which are rarely, if ever, addressed. I would put them under two general headings: 1) What is the objective of OA? I originally understood the objective to be to make scholarly research articles, in some form, accessible to all those who needed to read them. Subsequent refinements such as 'immediately', 'published version' and 'free to reuse' may have acquired quasi-religious status, but are surely secondary to this main objective. However, two other, financial, objectives (linked to each other, but not to the above) have gained increasing prominence. The first is the alleged cost saving (or at least cost shifting). The second - more malicious, and originally (but no longer) denied by OA's main proponents - is the undermining of publishers' businesses. If this were to work, we may be sure the effects would not be choosy about 'nice' or 'nasty' publishers. 2) Why hasn't OA been widely adopted by now? If as we have been repetitively assured over many years OA is self-evidently the right thing for scholars to do, why have so few of them done so voluntarily? As Jeffrey Beall points out, it seems very curious that scholars have to be forced, by mandates, to adopt a model which is supposedly preferable to the existing one. Could it be that the monotonous rantings of the few and the tiresome debates about the fine detail are actually confusing scholars, and may even be putting them off? Just asking ;-) I don't disagree that the subscription model is not going to be able to address the problems we face in making the growing volume of research available to those who need it; but I'm not convinced that OA (whether Green, Gold or any combination) will either. I think the solution, if there is one, still eludes us. Merry Christmas! Sally Sally Morris South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU Tel: +44 (0)1903 871286 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk _____ From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of David Prosser Sent: 09 December 2013 22:10 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility ofBeall's List 'Lackeys'? This is going beyond parody. David On 9 Dec 2013, at 21:45, Beall, Jeffrey wrote: Wouter, Hello, yes, I wrote the article, I stand by it, and I take responsibility for it. I would ask Prof. Harnad to clarify one thing in his email below, namely this statement, "OA is all an anti-capitlist plot." This statement's appearance in quotation marks makes it look like I wrote it in the article. The fact is that this statement does not appear in the article, and I have never written such a statement. Prof. Harnad and his lackeys are responding just as my article predicts. Jeffrey Beall From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Gerritsma, Wouter Sent: Monday, December 09, 2013 2:14 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List Dear all. Has this article really been written by Jeffrey Beall? He has been victim of a smear campaign before! I dont see he has claimed this article on his blog http://scholarlyoa.com/ or his tweet stream @Jeffrey_Beall (which actually functions as his RSS feed). I really like to hear from the man himself on his own turf. Wouter From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: maandag 9 december 2013 16:04 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List Beall, Jeffrey (2013) The <http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/525/514> Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access. 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 _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
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