Characters – Gavia Libraria

"The open-access movement has always had its… characters. Zealots. Kooks. Scary people. People who just Aren’t Our Sort, Dearie. Any old loon can start a weblog, after all; at least one Loon has done so. For all the differences the Loon has with some of OA’s other characters, she stops short of wishing them gone. It takes a certain amount of kookiness to provide energy sufficient to get anything done sometimes.

Moreover, engaging publicly with kookery is often a fool’s game, at best analogous to teaching pigs Mozart arias, at worst lending kooks credibility they do not deserve and should not be permitted to have. So OA tolerates its kooks, usually with kindness, sometimes with a politely blind eye or deaf ear… and that is largely as it should be.

Why did OA let Beall get away with his act so long? no one has yet asked, probably because the answer the Loon has just given is so patently obvious to those in the movement as not to need saying. (If the Loon had to characterize the attitude of those in the OA movement who noted Beall’s deep-seated antipathy toward OA months or even years previously—evidence was available for the persistent and perceptive—she would say it was “oh, him, he’ll blow himself up someday.” As, in fact, he has.) Nonetheless, there is a lesson in this that the movement could do with taking to heart: do not let your enemy control a visible, high-mindshare product or service in your space...."