[GOAL] Re: Beall on the open access movement: 3 reasonable points in a sea of nonsense
Beall`s paper is provocation but a clever one, as it points to some critical aspects of golden OA. I would like to emphasize that the three points summarized by Jeoron Bosman need further discussion and consideration but would also like to add a fourth (regarding the green type). There is much evidence that immediate deposit + performance evaluation strongly increases the rate of self-archiving but I am also convinced that a strong links to performance measurements can damage the reputation of OA in academia. In addition many scholars do not like paternalistic actions that much... Niels Taubert Am 10.12.2013 00:01, schrieb Bosman, J.M.: After thoroughly reading Beall's paper I can find three reasonable points raised. -Speculation on the effect of the price mechanism introduced between author and publisher through Gold OA journals with APC's. This is something that deserves close attention. It should be interesting to discuss the SCOAP model (http://scoap3.org/) in this regard. -The supposed absence of the a community function in broad OA megajournals. Is that true? Is it to be regretted? Are there alternative communities that function separate from the journal proper? -The supposed lack of warnings issued by OA advocates against predatory journals. I at least partly second Beall here. I myself was taken by surprise by the amazing speed with which these bogus journals came to rise. And DOAJ waited far too long with more stringent criteria. All three issues merit further discussion but alas in Beall's paper these points are drowning in a sea of unproductive nonsense. BTW many researchers in my university effectively have a mandate: to publish in first quartile impact factor JCR journals . Jeroen Bosman Utrecht University Library ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal -- Dr. Niels Taubert Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW) Rm. 373 Jaegerstr. 22/23 10117 Berlin Tel. 030-20370-453 Email. taub...@bbaw.de web. www.publikationssystem.de ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List
Dear Jean Claude, As you mention putting Beall's list into responsible hands you might be interested in this this Dutch initiative, now on trial in The Netherlands and Austria: http://www.quom.eu . It aims at crowdsourcing OA journal quality assessment. It uses (multiple) scorecards to assess journal quality etc. Although it is crowdsourced, for the moment publishing scorecards is restricted to university affiliated scholars. Best, Jeroen Utrecht University Library From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Jean-Claude Guédon Sent: maandag 9 december 2013 23:28 To: goal@eprints.org Subject: [GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List One should never underestimate Jeffrey Beall's sense of humour... [:-)] And we all admire his capacity for predictions and categorizations. This said, I would love to hear about those who did the peer review for Beall's article. Are there any? If not, perhaps the journal Triple-C could qualify to enter a certain Jeffrey Beall's list, even though this decision might give rise to a conflict of disinterest... Of course, my earlier suggestion to fork Beall's list and place it in responsible hands (such as DOAJ supported by a consortium of libraries) would allow moving past the conflict of disinterest. If Woody Allen ever should come across this (admittedly picayune) discussion, it could lead to some really funny moments in a good movie. Oh, Jeffrey Beall, what would we do without you? How dull the world! Does it take a mile-high city to create this kind of thinking? Oxygen, anyone? Jean-Claude Guédon Le lundi 09 décembre 2013 à 14:45 -0700, Beall, Jeffrey a écrit : 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.orgmailto: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 don't 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.orgmailto: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 Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Accesshttp://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/525/514. TripleC Communication, Capitalism Critique Journal. 11(2): 589-597 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
[GOAL] Re: Elsevier is taking down papers from Academia.edu
Thank you, Graham - all correct, and more clear and concise than I would have been! With kind wishes, Alicia Dr Alicia Wise Director of Access and Policy Elsevier I The Boulevard I Langford Lane I Kidlington I Oxford I OX5 1GB M: +44 (0) 7823 536 826 I E: a.w...@elsevier.commailto:a.w...@elsevier.com Twitter: @wisealic From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Graham Triggs Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2013 1:31 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Elsevier is taking down papers from Academia.edu On 9 December 2013 00:20, Heather Morrison heather.morri...@uottawa.camailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca wrote: Alicia, According to your statement below, with CC-BY the only restriction placed by Elsevier is for attribution. However, the Elsevier open access license policy clearly states that Elsevier demands an exclusive license to publish with open access works (including CC-BY). Can you explain this discrepancy? I don't believe this is a discrepancy. What it is saying that the definitive record is published by Elsevier, and the author provides an exclusive licence in order to do so. Re-publishing, or re-distributing via any other venue constitutes a derivative work, which is permissible and does not conflict with the exclusive licence (which is only on the definitive record, not the derivative) - providing the proper attribution is in place. Without the exclusive licence to the definitive record, then as the author retains copyright, then in theory the author could authorize publishing of a version of the definitive record without attribution to the Elsevier version. It's a question of preserving the version of record. The difference between the author providing a licence to Elsevier to distribute an article under CC-BY, and the author providing a CC-BY licence to Elsevier. Comment: Based on this wording it is clear that Elsevier is requiring an exclusive publishing license. This is not compatible with your explanation below that nothing is required beyond attribution as required by the CC-BY license. It is consistent - the article can be re-published elsewhere, providing it is accordance with the CC-BY licence, including attribution to the definitive record as published by Elsevier. G Elsevier Limited. Registered Office: The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford, OX5 1GB, United Kingdom, Registration No. 1982084, Registered in England and Wales. ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Fwd: Re: [Air-L] Open access and academia.edu
Dear all, currently there is some discussion on elsevier in some scientific mailing lists, see below for an example and also Randy Schekman in http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/09/nobel-winner-boycott-science-journals Bye from rainy Berlin, Katja Mruck Original-Nachricht Betreff:Re: [Air-L] Open access and academia.edu Datum: Tue, 10 Dec 2013 09:29:45 + Von:Natalie Sappleton n.sapple...@mmu.ac.uk An: ai...@listserv.aoir.org ai...@listserv.aoir.org Dear all A timely contribution in todays Guardian: Randy Schekman, who receives the Nobel prize on Tuesday, explains why he's eschewing the 'luxury' journals in favour of Open Access. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/09/nobel-winner-boycott-science-journals Natalie On 9 Dec 2013, at 22:59, Scott MacLeod sc...@scottmacleod.commailto:sc...@scottmacleod.com wrote: Hi Mathieu and AoIR, As part of the free, open, Academic Journals' 'ecosystem,' here's startup, C.C. World University and School's Academic Journal's wiki, Subject page - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Academic_Journals_at_WUaS#World_University_and_School_Links . World University and School (which is like Wikipedia with MIT OCW and planning online, C.C. MIT-centric, university degrees in many languages) is also planning to develop academic journals in large languages to begin. For example, at present anyone can go to any subject on the main, WUAS, wiki, Subjects page - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Subjects - in English only (at this time), and find Academia.eduhttp://Academia.edu near the top, and potentially add the article they've written to that subject. Here's an example of a Subject page ... 'Open_Access_Resources' at WUaS - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Open_Access_Resources - and as a C.C. wiki, anyone can start a Subject page in an area they're interested in, using this SUBJECT TEMPLATE - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/SUBJECT_TEMPLATE - or similar, which currently includes Academia.eduhttp://Academia.edu, since it's free and open, and makes it possible for academics to self- publish. Have AoIR-ers seen Harvard computer science Professor Stuart Shieber's recent blog entry Thoughts on founding open-access journals, which I've added to this WUaS Open Access Resources' subject using a version of the AAA citation approach: Shieber, Stuart. 2013. [http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2013/11/21/thoughts-on-founding-open-access-journals/ Thoughts on founding open-access journalshttp://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2013/11/21/thoughts-on-founding-open-access-journals/%20Thoughts%20on%20founding%20open-access%20journals]. November 21. Brookline, MA: blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2013/11/21/thoughts-on-founding-open-access-journals/http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2013/11/21/thoughts-on-founding-open-access-journals/. Stuart Shieber is one of the leading, tenured academic voices for open access journals, and writing very sensibly. As startup World University and School develops and begins to accredit for university degrees, WUaS's approaches to online journals will move beyond Academia.eduhttp://Academia.edu's approach, particularly with respect to the editorial Board per Stuart Shieber's article. (A huge project, wiki WUaS seeks to begin the MIT / Harvard of the internet and in all 7,105 languages and 242 countries, and Wikipedia, by way of comparison, is in 287 languages and just developed and deployed a CC database, Wikidata. And WUaS plans to become a significant employer eventually, first hiring graduate students from greatest universities, if possible, as journal editors, and instructors in G+ Hangouts for example, to MIT faculty in MIT OCW in video). I think Elsevier and Academia.eduhttp://Academia.edu will continue to pursue their publishing strategies, but make questions of Copyright and Creative Commons' licensing ( http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Creative_Commons_Law#World_University_and_School_Links ) more significant. Best, Scott - Scott MacLeod - Founder President - http://scottmacleod.com/worlduniversityandschool.html - World University and School - like Wikipedia with MIT OpenCourseWare (not endorsed by MIT OCW) - incorporated as a nonprofit effective April 2010. On Mon 09/12/13 1:49 PM , Mathieu ONeil mathieu.on...@anu.edu.aumailto:mathieu.on...@anu.edu.au sent: Hi Ivan Thanks for explaining! ;-) Well yes, pretty much everything you do online can be tracked, measured and sold (if that's what you mean by control). Nothing mysterious about that. Facebook and academia.eduhttp://academia.edu have the same model (they even look the same): you provide content, we network it. It's a trade-off. If anyone can set up a non-commercial alternative that offers the same functionalities, I'll jump in right away (@Rob: I'm looking at you!). Re. open-access, at the risk of repetition: if you just have volunteers (as most open access
[GOAL] Re: correction Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List
Dear list readers, Please excuse me: the link in my previous post should read: http://www.qoam.eu Jeroen From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Bosman, J.M. Sent: dinsdag 10 december 2013 10:23 To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' Subject: [GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List Dear Jean Claude, As you mention putting Beall's list into responsible hands you might be interested in this this Dutch initiative, now on trial in The Netherlands and Austria: http://www.quom.eu . It aims at crowdsourcing OA journal quality assessment. It uses (multiple) scorecards to assess journal quality etc. Although it is crowdsourced, for the moment publishing scorecards is restricted to university affiliated scholars. Best, Jeroen Utrecht University Library From: goal-boun...@eprints.orgmailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Jean-Claude Guédon Sent: maandag 9 december 2013 23:28 To: goal@eprints.orgmailto:goal@eprints.org Subject: [GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List One should never underestimate Jeffrey Beall's sense of humour... [:-)] And we all admire his capacity for predictions and categorizations. This said, I would love to hear about those who did the peer review for Beall's article. Are there any? If not, perhaps the journal Triple-C could qualify to enter a certain Jeffrey Beall's list, even though this decision might give rise to a conflict of disinterest... Of course, my earlier suggestion to fork Beall's list and place it in responsible hands (such as DOAJ supported by a consortium of libraries) would allow moving past the conflict of disinterest. If Woody Allen ever should come across this (admittedly picayune) discussion, it could lead to some really funny moments in a good movie. Oh, Jeffrey Beall, what would we do without you? How dull the world! Does it take a mile-high city to create this kind of thinking? Oxygen, anyone? Jean-Claude Guédon Le lundi 09 décembre 2013 à 14:45 -0700, Beall, Jeffrey a écrit : 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.orgmailto: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 don't 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.orgmailto: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 Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Accesshttp://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/525/514. TripleC Communication, Capitalism Critique Journal. 11(2): 589-597 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
[GOAL] Re: Elsevier is taking down papers from Academia.edu
There is a general point: the Elsevier site(s) are riddled with Open Access inconsistencies. I have discovered at least: * open access articles behind paywalls * articles advertised as open access but not labelled anywhere * (private correspondence) articles paid for as open access but never posted as such (espite correspondence by authors) * articles without any statement of open access (IMO both the HTML and PDF should have clear statements) * articles with conflicting messages (CC-BY and All rights reserved) There are other serious deficiencies: * the licence is often many pages down the paper (e.g. just before the references and very difficult to locate). It must be on the visible section of page 0. * the Rightslink is seriously broken. All this gives the consistent impression (over at least a year) of an organisation which doesn't care about doing it properly and/or isn't competent to do it. It is clearly a case of retrofitting something that hasn't been prepared for, and without enough investment. The whole area Open-access provided by Toll-Access publishers cries out for a body which creates acceptable practice guidelines, monitors compliance, fines offenders and restores mispaid APCs to authors. If an author pays 5000 USD for a product they deserve better than this. Elsevier are the worst offender that I have investigated, followed by Springer who took all my Open Access images, badged them as (C) SpringerImages and offered them for resale at 60 USD per image. Just because OA is only 5% of your business doesn't mean practice can be substandard. On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 12:06 PM, Heather Morrison heather.morri...@uottawa.ca wrote: Thank you for the clarification, Alicia and Graham. However, on the Elsevier copyright when publishing open access page, it states that under the Exclusive License Agreement used with open access journals, Elsevier is granted...An exclusive right to publish and distribute an article. From: http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-policies/author-agreement Also the graph on this page shows a one-way distribution from publisher to user. Whoever created this graph obviously does not understand open access. There is no author to publisher (for final version) to repository to whoever option illustrated, for example, and no publisher to user to downstream user who receives article from someone other than the publisher. Open access means that anyone can distribute the article. Even with CC restricted licenses, the restrictions are specific to certain types of uses (e.g. can distribute but not for commercial gain - NC; can distribute but not change - ND; can distribute and create derivatives but derivatives must have the same license - SA). An article that cannot be distributed by others is not open access. It would be helpful to review the actual author's agreement. I don't see a link from the Elsevier site - can you point me to a link? best, Heather Morrison On 2013-12-10, at 5:26 AM, Wise, Alicia (ELS-OXF) wrote: Thank you, Graham – all correct, and more clear and concise than I would have been! With kind wishes, Alicia Dr Alicia Wise Director of Access and Policy Elsevier I The Boulevard I Langford Lane I Kidlington I Oxford I OX5 1GB M: +44 (0) 7823 536 826 I E: a.w...@elsevier.com Twitter: @wisealic From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Graham Triggs Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2013 1:31 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Elsevier is taking down papers from Academia.edu On 9 December 2013 00:20, Heather Morrison heather.morri...@uottawa.ca wrote: Alicia, According to your statement below, with CC-BY the only restriction placed by Elsevier is for attribution. However, the Elsevier open access license policy clearly states that Elsevier demands an exclusive license to publish with open access works (including CC-BY). Can you explain this discrepancy? I don't believe this is a discrepancy. What it is saying that the definitive record is published by Elsevier, and the author provides an exclusive licence in order to do so. Re-publishing, or re-distributing via any other venue constitutes a derivative work, which is permissible and does not conflict with the exclusive licence (which is only on the definitive record, not the derivative) - providing the proper attribution is in place. Without the exclusive licence to the definitive record, then as the author retains copyright, then in theory the author could authorize publishing of a version of the definitive record without attribution to the Elsevier version. It's a question of preserving the version of record. The difference between the author providing a licence to Elsevier to distribute an article under CC-BY, and the author providing a CC-BY licence to Elsevier. Comment: Based on this wording it is clear that Elsevier is
[GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility ofBeall's List
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
[GOAL] Re: [sparc-oaforum] Re: [SIGMETRICS] Elsevier Study Commissioned by UK BIS
On 7 December 2013 12:56, Stevan Harnad amscifo...@gmail.com wrote: 4. The majority of publishers with Green OA embargoes have an embargo of one year (though 60%, including Elsevier and Springer, have no embargo at all). That's not true - Springer have adopted a 12 month embargo, and Elsevier require an embargo for non-voluntary deposits. (You can argue as much as you like about whether you can call a spade a fork, it doesn't change what the policy is). Further, your claim of 60% seems to be entirely based on Sherpa/RoMEO data - which you usually provide links to. Except the classifications of RoMEO alone does not lead to saying that 60% of journals / publishers have no embargo, as when you read through the restrictions, what you CAN do may be listed as being subject to an embagro (as in the case of Elsevier and Springer). The reasoning is that since free access after a year is a foregone conclusion, because of Green mandates, it's better if that free access is provided by publishers as Gold, so it all remains in their hands (navigation, search, reference linking, re-use, re-publication, etc.). Actually, providing that a CTA has been signed as part of publishing the article, then the re-use and re-publication is only possible in accordance with the licence(s) that the publisher allows the content to be distributed under. So, regardless of whether the content is on another site or not, the [publisher granted rights via CTA] still retain that control. Everyone gets Gold access after a year, and that's the end of it. Back to business as before -- unless the market prefers to pay the same price that it pays for subscriptions, in exchange for immediate, un-embargoed Gold OA (as in SCOAP3 or hybrid Gold). Where do you get same price from? Estimates put subscription revenue per article at around $4,000-$5,000, whereas even high-price hybrid Gold is only $3,000 an article (with an industry average closer to $1,000 per article). Your claim regarding SCOAP3 might have more substance if it wasn't a library and funding agency led initiative to reduce the cost of publishing in physics - something that 20 years of 100% OA in arXiv has failed to do. And* the inevitable is immediate Green OA*, with authors posting their refereed, accepted final drafts immediately upon acceptance for publication. That version will become the version of record, because *subscriptions to the publisher's print and online version will become unsustainable once the Green OA version is free for all*. If it was immediate Green OA of the refereed, accepted final draft (and it could be trusted that was the case), then there might be a chance of that happening. Might. Not that print is necessarily under threat from that - if people want print [enough], then they would continue to pay for it, regardless of where else it may exist, or at what cost. But that isn't what's happening, is it? Springer and Elsevier have introduced and/or lengthened embargoes in response to Green mandates (in Elsevier's case, the clause is specifically invoked by the presence of a mandate). These embargoes are going to exist as long as publishers believe that they are necessary. And so, if you expect to continue to publish -at no author cost - in the journals you choose to now, you are only going to see embargoes disappear if people will continue to pay the subscriptions. as Fair Gold (instead of today's over-priced, double-paid and double-dipped Fool's Gold) out of a fraction of the institutional annual windfall savings from their cancelled annual subscriptions. And the evidence of double-dipping is? On the other hand, not only has Wellcome stated there are indications of subscription price rises being constrained appropriately by limited uptake of hybrid Gold options, we have actual statements of subscription prices REDUCED because of Gold uptake in others: http://www.nature.com/press_releases/emboopen.html http://static.springer.com/sgw/documents/1345327/application/pdf/Springer+Open+Choice_Journal+Price+Adjustments+2013.pdf So both the 1-year embargo on Green and the 1-year release of Gold are attempts to fend off the above: *OA has become a fight for that first year of access: researchers need and want it immediately; publishers want to hold onto it unless they continue to be paid as much as they are being paid now.* No, publishers are going to hold onto it unless they continue to be paid *what they see* as a fair return on their costs. I can't ever see there not being a tension between academics and [commercial] publishers over profits. But changing the business model so that you pay upfront for publishing services can and will reduce the overall cost to the scholarly community. However, it would be a mistake to just talk about first year of access. Ownership of materials is also important. Aside from the other opportunity costs, not retaining ownership is what allows these embargoes to exist. Changing the
[GOAL] Re: Elsevier is taking down papers from Academia.edu
On 10 Dec 2013, at 13:05, Peter Murray-Rust pm...@cam.ac.uk wrote: Elsevier are the worst offender that I have investigated, followed by Springer who took all my Open Access images, badged them as (C) SpringerImages and offered them for resale at 60 USD per image. Just because OA is only 5% of your business doesn't mean practice can be substandard. Peter, what licence did you publish your OA images under? CC-BY? If so, re-labelling them as © Springer is a form of copyright breach (actionable?), but selling them isn't, of course. Jan Velterop___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility ofBeall's List
Sally Morris 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 don't know if I'm an OA conformist (and I do know I'm not the caricatural OA advocate depicted in Beall's paper, and I'm a bit tired of these tags), but : - I do think these are important questions that, contrary to what you suggest, have been discussed here and elswhere. They don't allow for simple answers, though. - I don't thank Beall to have raised them the way he did, because it won't make us progress on these issues. Worst, if Beall were to be taken seriously (which I doubt, but one never knows) it could do more harm to OA than the predatory publishers he rightly denounces. - I won't pillory you, and I wish you a peaceful Christmas. Marc Couture ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[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
[GOAL] Re: Elsevier is taking down papers from Academia.edu
On 10 December 2013 13:05, Peter Murray-Rust pm...@cam.ac.uk wrote: There is a general point: the Elsevier site(s) are riddled with Open Access inconsistencies. I have discovered at least: * open access articles behind paywalls * articles advertised as open access but not labelled anywhere * (private correspondence) articles paid for as open access but never posted as such (espite correspondence by authors) * articles without any statement of open access (IMO both the HTML and PDF should have clear statements) The question is whether these are honest mistakes, system failures, or something more deliberate. Occasionally, things are going to go wrong - especially when you are talking about options (e.g. as in a hybrid journal) rather than a blanket policy across a journal or publisher. However, they would still represent a breach of the contract that was agreed when the article was published. Which would mean two things: 1) The publisher should act quickly to comply with the terms of the contract 2) Compensation could be due to the injured party(ies) Which ought to mean refunding the author a portion of their APC (maybe 1/365th for each day or part day that it is closed access). And refunding anyone who paid to have access to the article. * articles with conflicting messages (CC-BY and All rights reserved) Copyright vs distribution / usage licence. These aren't really conflicting - in fact, it's only through asserting copyright that you can provide a CC licence. The reader is [still] granted the rights that have been reserved through copyright. There are other serious deficiencies: * the licence is often many pages down the paper (e.g. just before the references and very difficult to locate). It must be on the visible section of page 0. * the Rightslink is seriously broken. These are standards issues - or rather, that there is enough room for variability in what is legally required to actually make this difficult for users. So in order to make things easier, the industry should agree some standards that they will comply with. G ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Elsevier is taking down papers from Academia.edu
I will go one step further: I believe that all the instances noted by Peter are not simply oversights; I believe they are part of a kind of benign neglect aimed at creating as much confusion as possible. The result is that researchers do not know which way to and, therefore, abstain. At least, if I were a strategist within one of these big publishers, this is what I would strive to do: avoid direct confrontation and muddy the waters as much as you can while optimizing the revenue stream from whatever source. Jean-Claude Guédon Le mardi 10 décembre 2013 à 13:05 +, Peter Murray-Rust a écrit : There is a general point: the Elsevier site(s) are riddled with Open Access inconsistencies. I have discovered at least: * open access articles behind paywalls * articles advertised as open access but not labelled anywhere * (private correspondence) articles paid for as open access but never posted as such (espite correspondence by authors) * articles without any statement of open access (IMO both the HTML and PDF should have clear statements) * articles with conflicting messages (CC-BY and All rights reserved) There are other serious deficiencies: * the licence is often many pages down the paper (e.g. just before the references and very difficult to locate). It must be on the visible section of page 0. * the Rightslink is seriously broken. All this gives the consistent impression (over at least a year) of an organisation which doesn't care about doing it properly and/or isn't competent to do it. It is clearly a case of retrofitting something that hasn't been prepared for, and without enough investment. The whole area Open-access provided by Toll-Access publishers cries out for a body which creates acceptable practice guidelines, monitors compliance, fines offenders and restores mispaid APCs to authors. If an author pays 5000 USD for a product they deserve better than this. Elsevier are the worst offender that I have investigated, followed by Springer who took all my Open Access images, badged them as (C) SpringerImages and offered them for resale at 60 USD per image. Just because OA is only 5% of your business doesn't mean practice can be substandard. On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 12:06 PM, Heather Morrison heather.morri...@uottawa.ca wrote: Thank you for the clarification, Alicia and Graham. However, on the Elsevier copyright when publishing open access page, it states that under the Exclusive License Agreement used with open access journals, Elsevier is granted...An exclusive right to publish and distribute an article. From: http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-policies/author-agreement Also the graph on this page shows a one-way distribution from publisher to user. Whoever created this graph obviously does not understand open access. There is no author to publisher (for final version) to repository to whoever option illustrated, for example, and no publisher to user to downstream user who receives article from someone other than the publisher. Open access means that anyone can distribute the article. Even with CC restricted licenses, the restrictions are specific to certain types of uses (e.g. can distribute but not for commercial gain - NC; can distribute but not change - ND; can distribute and create derivatives but derivatives must have the same license - SA). An article that cannot be distributed by others is not open access. It would be helpful to review the actual author's agreement. I don't see a link from the Elsevier site - can you point me to a link? best, Heather Morrison On 2013-12-10, at 5:26 AM, Wise, Alicia (ELS-OXF) wrote: Thank you, Graham – all correct, and more clear and concise than I would have been! With kind wishes, Alicia Dr Alicia Wise Director of Access and Policy Elsevier I The Boulevard I Langford Lane I Kidlington I Oxford I OX5 1GB M: +44 (0) 7823 536 826 I E: a.w...@elsevier.com Twitter: @wisealic From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Graham Triggs Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2013 1:31 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Elsevier is taking down papers from Academia.edu On 9 December 2013 00:20, Heather Morrison heather.morri...@uottawa.ca wrote: Alicia, According to your statement below, with CC-BY the only restriction placed
[GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List
Many thanks, Jeroen. I am asking around about ways to take up Beall's list and make it fully legitimate. It is a very useful list, but Beall's appears to have put himself in an untenable situation now, either by excess cleverness, or sheer awkwardness (no to say worse). Simply speaking, he has discredited himself. I will report to the list if any positive developments arise. Jean-Claude Guédon Le mardi 10 décembre 2013 à 10:28 +, Gerritsma, Wouter a écrit : http://www.qoam.eu/ -- Jean-Claude Guédon Professeur titulaire Littérature comparée Université de Montréal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Elsevier is taking down papers from Academia.edu
On 10 December 2013 13:38, Jan Velterop velte...@gmail.com wrote: On 10 Dec 2013, at 13:05, Peter Murray-Rust pm...@cam.ac.uk wrote: Elsevier are the worst offender that I have investigated, followed by Springer who took all my Open Access images, badged them as (C) SpringerImages and offered them for resale at 60 USD per image. Just because OA is only 5% of your business doesn't mean practice can be substandard. Peter, what licence did you publish your OA images under? CC-BY? If so, re-labelling them as © Springer is a form of copyright breach (actionable?), but selling them isn't, of course Potentially, the images could be claimed to be derivative works, which could then by copyrighted. Springer no doubt does format conversions, resizing, etc. that may qualify this. And branding would presumably be watermarking to make the images unusable without a fee. However, even a copyrighted derivative should acknowledge the original copyright. Or even in terms of watermarking to make unpaid images unusable, they could use the original copyright. As Jan notes, providing a separate service that may be of value to those purchasing content via that means is not necessarily in conflict with open access. And as you have entered into a publishing agreement with Springer, that will no doubt include granting the rights to re-use the content elsewhere - including making the images available in a commercial service, even if the OA licence is infact CC-NC (or CC-NC-ND). (In fact, this can be of use to users, being able to purchase commercial use rights where the CC licence does not provide them). None of this [should] prevent the free use / re-use of images made available within the context of an open access article - i.e. if I go to the open access article, and download an image from there, I should be able to use it in accordance with the CC licence granted. Providing a separate, chargeable service to serve a different market with different needs is not necessarily wrong - offering different sizes, tagging for discovery (of images, rather than articles), possibly commercial rights, are all value adds. Ultimately people can choose to use [and pay] for it, or not. But they ought to be able to seek out the open access publication, and use the material acquired from there under the terms of the open access licence that is given. G ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Cameo Replies to Beall's List of Howlers
And now, a few deadpan rejoinders to just the most egregious of Beallhttp://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/525/514's howlers: *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.* There are two ways to provide OA: Publish your article in an OA journal (Gold OA) - or - Publish in any journal you freely choose, and self-archive your final peer-reviewed draft in your institution's OA repository (Green OA). *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 unnaturalmandates that take free choice away from individual researchers, mandates set and enforced by an onerous cadre of Soros-funded European autocrats…* Green OA provides online access to peer-reviewed research for all potential users, not just those ate subscribing institutions. With Green OA mandated, those who wish to continue paying subscriptions (and can afford to) are free to keep on paying them for as long as they like. Publish in any journal you freely choose, and self-archive your final peer-reviewed draft in your institution's OA repository (Green OA). *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…* There are two ways to provide OA: Publish your article in an OA journal (Gold OA) - or - Publish in any journal you freely choose, and self-archive your final peer-reviewed draft in your institution's OA repository (Green OA). *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).* Publish in any journal you freely choose, and self-archive your final peer-reviewed draft in your institution's OA repository (Green OA). *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?…* Publish in any journal you freely choose, and self-archive your final peer-reviewed draft in your institution's OA repository (Green OA). (Perhaps a publish-or-perishhttp://www.ercim.eu/publication/Ercim_News/enw64/harnad.html mandate, too, is academic slavery? Or a show-up-for-your-lectures-or-you're-fired mandate? Or a mandate to submit CVs digitally instead of in print? Or not smoke on the premises?) *[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…* Green OA provides online access to peer-reviewed research for all potential users, not just those at subscribing institutions. With Green OA mandated, those who wish to continue paying
[GOAL] Re: Pre-publication peer review (was: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List)
Each further day of thinking makes me feel closer and closer to this view. As an author, I just like when colleagues are happy with one of my texts online. As a reviewer I am fed up with unreadable junk. Let us burn together, Jan. Laurent Le 10 déc. 2013 à 15:36, Jan Velterop velte...@gmail.com a écrit : 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
[GOAL] Re: Pre-publication peer review (was: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List)
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,
[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 +, 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
[GOAL] Re: Elsevier is taking down papers from Academia.edu
CC-BY - they were published through BioMedCentral. Springer labelled all images that went through their business as (C) SpringerImages. This included Wikimedia, many third-parties and I even found D*sn*y content. Wikimedia rightly cared. No-one in academia cared. Of course it's copyright breach. The point is that toll-access publishers have a mentality that everything that crosses their doors belongs to them. It's much cheaper to claim the lot rather than work out what they own and what they don't. It's only awkward people like me who care. On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Jan Velterop velte...@gmail.com wrote: On 10 Dec 2013, at 13:05, Peter Murray-Rust pm...@cam.ac.uk wrote: Elsevier are the worst offender that I have investigated, followed by Springer who took all my Open Access images, badged them as (C) SpringerImages and offered them for resale at 60 USD per image. Just because OA is only 5% of your business doesn't mean practice can be substandard. Peter, what licence did you publish your OA images under? CC-BY? If so, re-labelling them as © Springer is a form of copyright breach (actionable?), but selling them isn't, of course. Jan Velterop ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Elsevier is taking down papers from Academia.edu
On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: I will go one step further: I believe that all the instances noted by Peter are not simply oversights; I believe they are part of a kind of benign neglect aimed at creating as much confusion as possible. The result is that researchers do not know which way to and, therefore, abstain. There are many hypotheses. I am not picking one in this case. * One, which I think happened about 10 years ago was general ignorance. We've never heard of this Open Access thing - etc. That's no longer the case anywhere * we simply don't care. Again I doubt that. Most publishers have heard of Open Access. Note that benign neglect when driving a car in UK is called careless driving and can land you in jail. careless publishing is an offence morraly and should be legally. * our company knows how to do things. I call this institutionisation, in keeping with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism. The organization as a whole is unaware of the injustice it is causing and may even think it is doing OK. * incompetence. Could also be system failure. * deliberate muddying. I differentiate this from careless publishing. I am absolutely sure it's happening. * moving the goal posts. Similar, but different. Here the position is clearly defined but constantly changing. At least, if I were a strategist within one of these big publishers, this is what I would strive to do: avoid direct confrontation and muddy the waters as much as you can while optimizing the revenue stream from whatever source. The fact that the *deliberate* policy on CC-BY vs CC-NC/ND is so messy is an indication that muich of this is deliberate. PLOS/BMC/eLife/PeerJ/Ubiquity... are honest brokers. Pay your APC and they provide very clear CC-BY. There was never any question. The Toll-access publishers could an should have done this. Springer and Wiley have (I think) universal CC-BY. Good for them. But many others have offered tempting CC-NC and authors have chosen it. The analysis is as sophisticated as going into a class of 10-year-olds and asking do you want carrot salad or do you want burger and chips and fried mars bar? Oh and the burger is cheaper. Of course authors aren't sophisticated enough to know that the *only* beneficiaries of CC-NC are the publishers because they then have a monopoly to sell reprints (which could be tens of thousands of USD per paper). -- Jean-Claude Guédon Professeur titulaire Littérature comparée Université de Montréal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Pre-publication peer review (was: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List)
Same inkling as Jan Laurent. The way fwd for OAP would be some form of accreditation by repository publisher. One would need to show what review quality assurance mechanism is used, e.g. Pre- Post- Open peer review and demonstrate annually to the accreditation agency that this is what you are doing. The rest can be left to authors, readers and reviewers... Chris Von Samsung Mobile gesendet Ursprüngliche Nachricht Von: Laurent Romary Datum:10.12.2013 17:31 (GMT+01:00) An: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Betreff: [GOAL] Re: Pre-publication peer review (was: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List) Each further day of thinking makes me feel closer and closer to this view. As an author, I just like when colleagues are happy with one of my texts online. As a reviewer I am fed up with unreadable junk. Let us burn together, Jan. Laurent Le 10 déc. 2013 à 15:36, Jan Velterop velte...@gmail.commailto:velte...@gmail.com a écrit : 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.ukmailto: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.ukmailto:sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk From: goal-boun...@eprints.orgmailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org
[GOAL] Re: Pre-publication peer review (was: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List)
zeroPPPR leads to an immediate immense saving of human effort and cost - the removal of the arbitrary authoring torture-chambers created by publishers. This has the following benefits: * authors can choose the means of authoring that their community converges on. The crystallographers (and I am proud to be involved) have created the best scientific authoring system (CIF) for data-rich science. The community uses it. Download Knuth created the best document authoring system LaTeX 30 years ago. TimBl created HTML - a brilliant, simple flexible tool. Why do we not use these? Because the publishers can be bothered to change their arcane, archaic systems. At least 1 billion USD of data is destroyed in the publication process in chemistry alone. * authoring would be faster. No retyping for different journals * authoring would be higher quality. There could be an intermediate market for organizations and companies who helped authors created better documents if they wanted to pay. Markup languages, etc. would flourish * the higher quality (e.g. HTML5) leads to better ways of presenting the material. Why do people have to turn their heads through 90 deg simply to read a landscape table. It could be i-n-t-e-r-a-c-t-i-v-e (there's a thought!) * Gosh, we might even have versions (like Github) The saving of time, the better quality will rapidly add up to saved billions both upstream and downstream of the publication event. New publication-consuming industries would arise. But see how strongly publishers resist the re-use of information - lobbying against content-mining and spraying CC-ND around. ... it was all a dream. On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 3:30 PM, Sally Morris sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk wrote: 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
[GOAL] Don't Conflate OA with Peer-Review Reform
On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 11:44 AM, Armbruster, Chris chris.armbrus...@eui.eu wrote: Same inkling as Jan Laurent. The way fwd for OAP would be some form of accreditation by repository publisher. One would need to show what review quality assurance mechanism is used, e.g. Pre- Post- Open peer review and demonstrate annually to the accreditation agency that this is what you are doing. The rest can be left to authors, readers and reviewers... Ah me! Are we going to go yet another round of this irrelevant loop? http://j.mp/OAnotPReform The purpose of OA (it's not OAP, it's OA) is to make peer-reviewed research freely accessible online to all of its potential users, webwide, not just to subscribers -- by freeing peer-reviewed research from access tolls, not by freeing it from peer review (nor by first reforming and reassigning peer review). Haven't we already waited long enough? Stevan Harnad Ursprüngliche Nachricht Von: Laurent Romary Datum:10.12.2013 17:31 (GMT+01:00) An: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Betreff: [GOAL] Re: Pre-publication peer review (was: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List) Each further day of thinking makes me feel closer and closer to this view. As an author, I just like when colleagues are happy with one of my texts online. As a reviewer I am fed up with unreadable junk. Let us burn together, Jan. Laurent Le 10 déc. 2013 à 15:36, Jan Velterop velte...@gmail.com a écrit : 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
[GOAL] Re: [***SPAM***] Don't Conflate OA with Peer-Review Reform
Stevan, I think it is perfectly possible to discuss and promote experiments with more effective and useful review whilst keeping full force in switching to 100% OA. They are not prerequisites for one another. We cannot stop thinking and hypothesizing about innovation in scholarly communication, but maybe we should take that discussion to another list. Best, Jeroen Op 10 dec. 2013 om 18:46 heeft Stevan Harnad amscifo...@gmail.commailto:amscifo...@gmail.com het volgende geschreven: On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 11:44 AM, Armbruster, Chris chris.armbrus...@eui.eumailto:chris.armbrus...@eui.eu wrote: Same inkling as Jan Laurent. The way fwd for OAP would be some form of accreditation by repository publisher. One would need to show what review quality assurance mechanism is used, e.g. Pre- Post- Open peer review and demonstrate annually to the accreditation agency that this is what you are doing. The rest can be left to authors, readers and reviewers... Ah me! Are we going to go yet another round of this irrelevant loop? http://j.mp/OAnotPReform The purpose of OA (it's not OAP, it's OA) is to make peer-reviewed research freely accessible online to all of its potential users, webwide, not just to subscribers -- by freeing peer-reviewed research from access tolls, not by freeing it from peer review (nor by first reforming and reassigning peer review). Haven't we already waited long enough? Stevan Harnad Ursprüngliche Nachricht Von: Laurent Romary Datum:10.12.2013 17:31 (GMT+01:00) An: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Betreff: [GOAL] Re: Pre-publication peer review (was: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List) Each further day of thinking makes me feel closer and closer to this view. As an author, I just like when colleagues are happy with one of my texts online. As a reviewer I am fed up with unreadable junk. Let us burn together, Jan. Laurent Le 10 déc. 2013 à 15:36, Jan Velterop velte...@gmail.commailto:velte...@gmail.com a écrit : 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.ukmailto: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
[GOAL] Re: [***SPAM***] Don't Conflate OA with Peer-Review Reform
Jeroen, Which list? Already existing or starting a new one, let us know, I'm quite interested, and probably not the only one. Cheers Serge De : goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] De la part de Bosman, J.M. Envoyé : mardi 10 décembre 2013 21:50 À : Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Objet : [GOAL] Re: [***SPAM***] Don't Conflate OA with Peer-Review Reform Stevan, I think it is perfectly possible to discuss and promote experiments with more effective and useful review whilst keeping full force in switching to 100% OA. They are not prerequisites for one another. We cannot stop thinking and hypothesizing about innovation in scholarly communication, but maybe we should take that discussion to another list. Best, Jeroen Op 10 dec. 2013 om 18:46 heeft Stevan Harnad amscifo...@gmail.commailto:amscifo...@gmail.com het volgende geschreven: On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 11:44 AM, Armbruster, Chris chris.armbrus...@eui.eumailto:chris.armbrus...@eui.eu wrote: Same inkling as Jan Laurent. The way fwd for OAP would be some form of accreditation by repository publisher. One would need to show what review quality assurance mechanism is used, e.g. Pre- Post- Open peer review and demonstrate annually to the accreditation agency that this is what you are doing. The rest can be left to authors, readers and reviewers... Ah me! Are we going to go yet another round of this irrelevant loop? http://j.mp/OAnotPReform The purpose of OA (it's not OAP, it's OA) is to make peer-reviewed research freely accessible online to all of its potential users, webwide, not just to subscribers -- by freeing peer-reviewed research from access tolls, not by freeing it from peer review (nor by first reforming and reassigning peer review). Haven't we already waited long enough? Stevan Harnad Ursprüngliche Nachricht Von: Laurent Romary Datum:10.12.2013 17:31 (GMT+01:00) An: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Betreff: [GOAL] Re: Pre-publication peer review (was: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List) Each further day of thinking makes me feel closer and closer to this view. As an author, I just like when colleagues are happy with one of my texts online. As a reviewer I am fed up with unreadable junk. Let us burn together, Jan. Laurent Le 10 déc. 2013 à 15:36, Jan Velterop velte...@gmail.commailto:velte...@gmail.com a écrit : 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.ukmailto: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
[GOAL] Institutional deposits and retracted papers
Hi, The forced retraction of the Séralini paper from an Elsevier journal (an attack in itself on the integrity of the scientific publication process and a clear sign that the Pre publication review process is really agonizing) makes me wonder what happens to a paper that has been retracted from a journal, but that had been deposited in a repository. Should it be also retracted from the repository? By whom? On whose authority? Did it happen already? Florence Piron, Québec http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Open_letter_to_FCT_and_Elsevier.php ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
