Collateral damage of the non-open reviewing boycott | Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

"Regular readers will know that, as part of a broader strategy favouring open-access publishing, I no longer perform peer-reviews for non-open journals.  (I mentioned a recent example in a comment on the last article.)  I’ve had support for this stance from some impressive quarters; but also a fair bit of criticism from people who I respect.  That includes some strong open-access advocates who agree with me on where we want to land up, but don’t like the tactics I’m using to get there.

The most detailed of those criticisms in an article entitled Should we review for any old journal? by Andy Farke, and I think it deserves a detailed response.  Andy’s open-access credentials are impeccable — he writes about the issue in detail on his blog, and is an editor for PLoS ONE, by most metrics the leading open-access journal.  So when he has a criticism, it’s worth hearing...."