Librarians must be the first to develop skills in what we might
call scholarly publishing literacy, and then they must share these skills with their patrons. Thus, librarians need to add value to online information by helping validate it, and they must not blindly promote OA works just because they fulfill a certain collectivist ideology. Librarians have a tendency to be neophiliacs; they adopt a new technology or a new system merely because it is new. Librarians must be more discerning and must exclude political ideology from their library management operations. Many librarians are enthusiastic about the still unproven Alt-Metrics just because it is new. Librarians’ analyses of novel solutions tend to be
gushing rather than critical…
The library profession’s own culture war!! Who wrote this?
Jeffrey Beale! From 2013. See doi:10.1087/20130203
I suspect this person has been turned down for Library School in the past. “Gushing” is harsh.
here’s the latest from Beall :
That quote is from https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/beall-social-justice-warrior-librarians-betraying-academy
And would make an interesting reading for a panel, or a discussion group.
We must keep politics/ideology out of it…
Unless of course it’s right-wing politics/ideology (pro-big corporations, anti-left-wing etc) in which case it’s fine.
Hypocrite!
Oh the horror of helping the “little guy”…
Someone left this useful comment on the article that Anton posted above (last comment):
“Well, nobody knows exactly what the OA future will be. However, alternative OA publishing funding models with an overall cost-reducing potential do exist, and more are being proposed or experimented. In fact, the majority of legitimate OA journals (i.e. accepted in DOAJ), including among the 600+ published by Elsevier and Springer, are free for authors (source : data available on DOAJ and Elsevier websites).”
And the first comment from Charles Oppenheim was:
“Yes, there are problems with some OA journals, just as there are (different) problems with some subscription journals. It’s the subscription publishers’ arrogance, price rises and high profit margins that annoy librarians. They are not motivated by a wish to destroy said publishers, rather by a wish to get affordable access to all who need it. Beall is an obsessive who should be ignored.”
Apparently “academic librarians are threatening the future of science communication and scientists.” (In the TLS article Anton links to) Who knew we had such power??
On the other hand…
* Beall in the article does qualify his statements: “some scholarly librarians” and “[he] made a lot of mistakes…it [viz., Beall’s list] wasn’t perfect”
* As Beall notes, I’ve noticed too some discussion in other forums on the increased time pressure on the peer review process. Not sure how much OA is responsible for that (as opposed to environments such as PBRF in NZ)
There is some mistaken conflation between a lack of rigorous review and Open Access. It’s true that OA can apply just as much to non-reviewed material as reviewed material, but there is no direct relationship. OA stuff can be just as rigorously reviewed as toll based material, and you need to use your brain to work out what the context of what you are reading is.
Who remembers the Sokal hoax?
And many more spoof articles since, as listed by the book Stinging the Predators, which is outlined on this page (includes a link to the book’s full text) http://www.improbable.com/2017/08/07/all-these-papers-were-deliberately-bad/
I love those spoof articles. I have just come back from talking to Waterways postgrads about science publishing and I showed them several spoof papers. One was written by a man and his dog…
The students recognized the predatory publishing phenomena when after a conference last year they were all sent an email offering to publish their conference paper for $2000. I told them the Institutional Repository will do this for them for no charge at all
Not sure about Sting the Predator editor’s assertion that the papers are all about predatory publishing. The Sokal Hoax was mocking the influence of postmodernist theory on humanities research while the “The Conceptual Penis” was aimed at perceived extreme ideology within academia.
Though for a spoof article, I reckon you can’t go past Drop Bears (http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2013/04/drop-bears-target-tourists,-study-says/). Look at the fangs on that beast!
An interesting recent announcement from the American Chemical Society: their free ACS Reviewer Lab training course https://www.acsreviewerlab.org/.