[GOAL] Lacking any sense of proportion: Michael Eisen pushes back on The New York Times’ “dark side of open access” article

[Omega Alpha | Open Access]

Lacking any sense of proportion: Michael Eisen pushes back on The New York Times’ “dark side of open access” article
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On Sunday, April 7, 2013, The New York Times ran a front page article written by Gina Kolata entitled, “Scientific Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too),” which exposed “a world of pseudo-academia [running parallel with legitimate scientific and scholarly communication], complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them.”
 
…
 
The article quotes several scholars, who as a result of their personal experience have come to call this parallel world the “Wild West,” or the “dark side of open access.” The article also refers to the work of research librarian Jeffrey Beall, who tracks what he calls “predatory open access journals,” estimating “that there are as many as 4,000 predatory journals today, at least 25 percent of the total number of open-access journals.”
 
The article is highlighting a real problem. But after acknowledging (barely, in passing) that “open access got its start about a decade ago and quickly won widespread acclaim with the advent of well-regarded, peer-reviewed journals like those published by the Public Library of Science,” the clear message is that scholars today ought to be skeptical and suspicious about open access. Though not stated—indeed no constructive response or course of action is really offered in the article—the impression is left that in the face of open access run amuck, the only safe harbor is the “traditional business model…built on subscription revenues.”
 
continues…

Gary F. Daught
Omega Alpha | Open Access
Advocate for open access academic publishing in religion and theology
http://oaopenaccess.wordpress.com/
oa.openaccess at gmail dot com | @OAopenaccess