[GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List
Jean-Claude Guédon
jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca
Mon Dec 9 22:27:36 GMT 2013
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-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at 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-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at 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 Access. 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
> predatory publishers and standalone journals, increasing the
> amount of research misconduct in scholarly publications and
> the amount of pseudo-science that is published as if it were
> authentic science."
>
>
>
>
>
>
> JB: "[F]rom their high-salaried comfortable positions…OA
> advocates... demand that for-profit, scholarly journal
> publishers not be involved in scholarly publishing and devise
> ways (such as green open-access) to defeat and eliminate
> them...
>
>
>
>
>
>
> JB: "OA advocates use specious arguments to lobby for
> mandates, focusing only on the supposed economic benefits of
> open access and ignoring the value additions provided by
> professional publishers. The arguments imply that publishers
> are not really needed; all researchers need to do is upload
> their work, an action that constitutes publishing, and that
> this act results in a product that is somehow similar to the
> products that professional publishers produce….
>
>
>
>
>
>
> JB: "The open-access movement isn't really about open access.
> Instead, it is about collectivizing production and denying the
> freedom of the press from those who prefer the subscription
> model of scholarly publishing. It is an anti-corporatist,
> oppressive and negative movement, one that uses young
> researchers and researchers from developing countries as pawns
> to artificially force the make-believe gold and green
> open-access models to work. The movement relies on unnatural
> mandates that take free choice away from individual
> researchers, mandates set and enforced by an onerous cadre of
> Soros-funded European autocrats...
>
>
>
>
>
>
> JB: "The open-access movement is a failed social movement and
> a false messiah, but its promoters refuse to admit this. The
> emergence of numerous predatory publishers – a product of the
> open-access movement – has poisoned scholarly communication,
> fostering research misconduct and the publishing of
> pseudo-science, but OA advocates refuse to recognize the
> growing problem. By instituting a policy of exchanging funds
> between researchers and publishers, the movement has fostered
> corruption on a grand scale. Instead of arguing for
> openaccess, we must determine and settle on the best model for
> the distribution of scholarly research, and it's clear that
> neither green nor gold open-access is that model...
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> And then, my own personal favourites:
>
>
>
>
> JB: "Open access advocates think they know better than
> everyone else and want to impose their policies on others.
> Thus, the open access movement has the serious side-effect of
> taking away other's freedom from them. We observe this
> tendency in institutional mandates. Harnad (2013) goes so far
> as to propose [an]…Orwellian system of mandates… documented
> [in a] table of mandate strength, with the most restrictive
> pegged at level 12, with the designation "immediate deposit +
> performance evaluation (no waiver option)". This Orwellian
> system of mandates is documented in Table 1...
>
>
>
>
>
>
> JB: "A social movement that needs mandates to work is doomed
> to fail. A social movement that uses mandates is abusive and
> tantamount to academic slavery. Researchers need more freedom
> in their decisions not less. How can we expect and demand
> academic freedom from our universities when we impose
> oppressive mandates upon ourselves?..."
>
>
>
>
>
> Stay tuned!…
>
>
>
>
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
>
>
>
>
>
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--
Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal
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