[GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List
Jean-Claude Guédon
jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca
Sat Dec 14 20:53:17 GMT 2013
Sally,
Re-use and text mining are not the same thing. If I distribute my own
articles in my own classroom, this is re-use and it relies only on eye
contact, not machine-reading. That scholars are not yet focused on
text-mining is simply the result, of inertia and force of habit. It is
coming, but it is coming slowly. However, slowness does not prevent from
thinking ahead, and many publishers certainly are. The "executable
paper" bounty offered by Elsevier a couple of years ago shows another
publishing angle which, for the moment, is not much on the scholars'
radars, but it will be. Creating new "societies of texts" through
various kinds of algorithms will be the same. Publishers are thinking
about these issues. Some OA advocates are doing the same, not on the
basis of surveys that tend to emphasize the past and the familiar, but
rather in a future-looking perspective.
Regarding an earlier post of your that seemed to complain that OA
advocates are using too narrow and too strict a definition of open
access, you might consider that the publishing industry, for its part,
has done its utmost to confuse issues by throwing all kinds of new
terms. Muddying the waters and making the whole scene as illegible to
regular scientists as is possible, all the while raising the fear of
various legal interventions in the background (e.g. Michael Mabe
recently in Berlin, alluding to the possibility of ant-trust actions in
reaction to libraries coordinating too well for the industry's taste)
cannot be treated as if it did not happen or had not been planned and
engineered with one aim: slow down acceptance by all possible means, and
try taking control of the movement to exploit it the publishers' way.
Also, this is the first time that I see people being criticized simply
for trying to be precise and unambiguous. I guess mathematicians must be
extremely rigid, unreasonable, and uncooperative people...
Finally, the focus of OA is not to destroy the publishing industry.
Saying this amounts to some form of paranoia. Some OA advocates,
including myself, are very angry at some members of the publishing
industry, but these are individuals, not the OA movement. Some OA
supporters try to imagine alternatives to the present publishing system.
This means competition, I guess. But it may be that the publishing
industry does not like competition, true competition. Some os us
strongly feel that research communication comes first, and the
publishing industry a distant second, so that the publishing industry
should not consider scholarly communication as if it were a gold mine
ready to be pillaged at will (45% profit, to my mind, is pillaging, and
pillaging a lot of public money, to boot). But perhaps I am a little too
precise here... :-)
As for scholars, they do not have to be forced by mandates. Just tell
them, as was done in Belgium, that you will be evaluated on the basis of
only what is available in the right depository, and everything will fall
into place. Now, researchers paid by universities or research centres
cannot object to being evaluated, and to reasonable rules of evaluation
such as deposit your publications in this box if you want to have them
taken into account.
Open access is beneficial to researchers, and that is obvious. But being
obvious is not necessarily self-evident. To be obvious, one needs to
look at studies on citation advantages, assess them, etc. But if local
evaluations do not pay attention to these advantages, why should a
scholar pay great attention so long as promotions and grants keep coming
on the basis of fallacious metrics such as impact factors of journal
titles.
To meditate further on the distinction between obvious and self-evident,
one only needs to rehearse all the arguments that were being adduced by
opponents to both the American and French revolutions: democracy was
obviously better than absolute monarchy, at least for most people; but
the elites threw enough arguments into the air to make it less than
self-evident for quite a while.
Finally, I would like you to think seriously and deeply about what
Jacinto Dávila wrote in response to you. Developing nations are hit in a
number of nasty ways by a communication system that seems to think that
knowledge is not fit for Third World brains, or that Third World brains
are good enough only if they focus on problems defined by rich
countries. Make no mistake about this: the anger in those parts of the
world where 80% of humanity lives is rising and what the consequences of
this anger will be, I cannot foretell, but they will likely be dire and
profound. If I were in your shoes, I would be scared.
Jean-Claude Guédon
Le vendredi 13 décembre 2013 à 13:14 +0000, Sally Morris a écrit :
> I don't deny that re-use (e.g. text mining) is a valuable attribute of
> OA for some scholars; interestingly, however, it is rarely if ever
> mentioned in surveys which ask scholars for their own unprompted
> definition of OA. That suggests to me that it is not fundamental in
> most scholars' minds.
>
> The few responses to my original posting have all focused on whether
> the 'credo' of the BBB declarations is or is not fundamental to the
> underlying concept of OA. I find it interesting that no one has
> commented at all on the two main points I was trying to make (perhaps
> not clearly enough):
>
> 1) The focus of OA seems to be, to a considerable extent, the
> destruction of the publishing industry: note the hostile language of,
> for example, Peter M-R's 'occupying power'
>
> 2) It still seems curious to me (as to Beall) that scholars have to
> be forced, by mandates, to comply with a behaviour which is considered
> be self-evidently beneficial to them
>
> Does this mean that everyone agrees with me on both points?! ;-)
>
> Sally
>
> Sally Morris
> South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU
> Tel: +44 (0)1903 871286
> Email: sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk
>
>
>
>
>
> ______________________________________________________________________
> From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On
> Behalf Of Penny Andrews
> Sent: 12 December 2013 17:04
> To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
> Subject: [GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility
> of Beall's List
>
>
>
>
> Sally, for many scholars (who do currently exist, not just in the
> future) textmining is their main research activity. Open licensing to
> do that unimpeded isn't some theoretical paradise, it's what they need
> right now to do their work.
>
> On Thursday, December 12, 2013, Sally Morris wrote:
>
> I agree completely that 'green' and 'gold' (however tightly or
> loosely defined) are the means, not the end
>
> But I still feel that the BOAI definition may be an
> unnecessarily tight/narrow definition of the end: optimal
> scholarly exchange, as you put it (or unimpeded access to
> research articles for those who need to read them, as I would
> perhaps more narrowly describe it)
>
> Sally
>
> Sally Morris
> South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK
> BN13 3UU
> Tel: +44 (0)1903 871286
> Email: sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk
>
>
>
>
>
> ______________________________________________________________
> From: goal-bounces at eprints.org
> [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Jan Velterop
> Sent: 12 December 2013 13:44
> To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
> Subject: [GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly
> CompromisesCredibilityofBeall's List
>
>
>
> But Sally, so-called 'green' and 'gold' are the means. The
> BOAI definition is an articulation of the end, the goal. Of
> course, if you navigate the ocean of politics and vested
> interests of science publishing, you need to tack sometimes to
> make progress against the wind. That's permissible, even
> necessary. But it doesn't change the intended destination on
> which a good sailor keeps his focus. If that's religion,
> anything is. (Which may be the case :-)).
>
>
> One mistake made by some OA advocates is to elevate the means
> to the goal. Another one is to confuse the temporary course of
> tacking with the overall course needed to reach the
> destination.
>
> In the larger picture, OA itself is but a means, of course. To
> the goal of optimal scholarly knowledge exchange. And so on,
> Russian doll like. But that's a different discussion, I think
>
> Jan Velterop
>
>
>
>
> On 12 Dec 2013, at 12:03, "Sally Morris"
> <sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
> > What I'm saying is that OA may have done itself a disservice
> > by adhering so rigidly to tight definitions. A more relaxed
> > focus on the end rather than the means might prove more
> > appealing to the scholars for whose benefit it is supposed
> > to exist
> >
> > Sally
> >
> > Sally Morris
> > South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK
> > BN13 3UU
> > Tel: +44 (0)1903 871286
> > Email: sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ____________________________________________________________
> > From: goal-bounces at eprints.org
> > [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of David Prosser
> > Sent: 12 December 2013 08:37
> > To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
> > Subject: [GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises
> > CredibilityofBeall's List
> >
> >
> >
> > Let me get this right, Jean-Claude mentioning the Budapest
> > Open Access Initiative to show that re-use was an integral
> > part of the original definition of open access and not some
> > later ('quasi-religeous') addition as Sally avers. And by
> > doing so he is betraying some type of religious zeal?
> >
> >
> > One of the interesting aspect of the open access debate has
> > been the language. Those who argue against OA have been
> > keen to paint OA advocates as 'zealots', extremists, and
> > impractical idealists. I've always felt that such
> > characterisation was an attempt to mask the paucity of
> > argument.
> >
> >
> > David
> >
> >
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL at eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
--
Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20131214/f247bb28/attachment-0001.html
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: face-smile.png
Type: image/png
Size: 925 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20131214/f247bb28/attachment-0001.png
More information about the GOAL
mailing list