I actually think that J-C's response illustrates very clearly how OA has been mistaken for a religion, with its very own 'gospel'. This, IMHO, is part of its problem! 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 Jean-Claude Guédon Sent: 10 December 2013 15:26 To: goal@eprints.org Subject: [GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility ofBeall's List In response to Sally, I would remind her that re-use was part of the original BOAI declaration. Scholars and teachers need more than eye-contact with articles. So, this is not a secondary point. The immediacy issue concerns deposit; it is simply a pragmatic and obvious point: capturing an article at time of acceptance is optimal for exposure and circulation of information. If the publisher does not allow public exposure and imposes an embargo - thus slowing down the circulation of knowledge -, the private request button allows for eye contact, at least. This button solution is not optimal, but it will do on a pragmatic scale so long as it is needed to circumvent publishers' tactics. Cost savings are not part of BOAI; it is a request by administrators of research centres and their libraries. This said, costs of OA publishing achieved by a platform such as Scielo are way beneath the prices practised by commercial publishers (including non-profit ones). And it should become obvious that if you avoid 45% profit rates, you should benefit. The distinction between "nice" and "nasty" publishers is of unknown origin and I would not subscribe to it. More fundamentally, we should ask and ask again whether scientific publishing is meant to help scientific research, or the reverse. Seen from the former perspective, embargoes appear downright absurd. As for why OA has not been widely accepted now, the answer is not difficult to find: researchers are evaluated; the evaluation, strangely enough, rests on journal reputations rather than on the intrinsic quality of articles. Researchers simply adapt to this weird competitive environment as best they can, and do not want to endanger their career prospects in any way. As a result, what counts for them is not how good their work is, but rather where they can publish it. Open Access, by stressing a return to intrinsic quality of work, implicitly challenges the present competition rules. As such, it appears at best uncertain or even threatening to researchers under career stress. So long as evaluation rests on journal titles, the essential source of power within scientific publishing will rest with the major international publishers. They obviously believe research was invented to serve them! The interesting point about mega journals, incidentally, is that they are not really journals, but publishing platforms. Giving an impact factor to PLoS One is stupid: citation cultures vary from discipline to discipline, and the mix of disciplines within PLoS One varies with time. Doing a simple average of the citations of the whole is methodologically faulty: remember that scientists in biomed disciplines quote about four times as much as mathematicians. What if, over a certain period of time, the proportion of mathematical articles triples for whatever reason? The raw impact factor will go down. Does this mean anything in terms of quality? Of course not! Jean-Claude Guédon Le mardi 10 décembre 2013 à 13:36 +0000, Sally Morris a écrit : 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 -- Jean-Claude Guédon Professeur titulaire Littérature comparée Université de Montréal
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