[GOAL] Re: Has the OA movement over-reacted to challenges on peer review?

[Beall, Jeffrey]

In the interest of presenting different viewpoints on this topic, I too would like to share the blog post I published today. My blog post is about a gold open-access journal that claims it has no article processing charges but, when you read the fine print, you will discover that it demands a "maintenance fee" from authors whose work is accepted for publication. 

The blog post is here: http://scholarlyoa.com/2015/05/12/low-quality-no-author-fee-oa-journal-has-hidden-charges/

Also, the journal promises to carry out peer review in 3-4 days. It's included in DOAJ, which incorrectly reports that the journal does not charge any author fees. 

The journal also boldly displays fake impact factors from six different companies. 

I believe that this journal will also be of interest to historians, anthropologists, and other social scientists.


Jeffrey Beall, MA, MSLS, Associate Professor
Auraria Library
University of Colorado Denver
1100 Lawrence St.
Denver, Colo.  80204 USA

-----Original Message-----
From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison
Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 2015 2:39 PM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Has the OA movement over-reacted to challenges on peer review?

In the early days as many on this list will no doubt remember, open access advocates spent a lot of time defending OA from the ludicrous argument that peer review somehow was dependent on subscription-based publishing. Have we over-reacted, and are we now placing far too much emphasis on the technicalities of peer review? 

This post draws on an example of a journal that is now fully open access and peer reviewed, which emerged from a conference a few decades ago after a 5-year stint as a newsletter, and asks whether we have gone too far in separating the peer-reviewed article from the broader scholarly communication / community of which the article logically forms just one part:
http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/05/12/from-conference-to-newsletter-to-journal-a-challenge-to-the-emphasis-on-peer-review/

I've added two sections to the Research Questions page in the Open Access Directory:
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Research_questions

Open access in the context of scholarly communication and community flows from the challenge to narrow emphasis on peer review described above. There are questions here that might interest historians, anthropologists, or other social scientists.

The open versus private section may engage scholars from a variety of humanities and social sciences; there are interesting theoretical and empirical questions in relation to all of the open movements. 

best,

--
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies University of Ottawa http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca



_______________________________________________
GOAL mailing list
GOAL at eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal