Beall needlessly compromises credibility of Beall's list: "OA is anti-capitalism conspiracy!"

Amsciforum 2013-12-09

Summary:

This wacky article is going to be fun to review. I still think Jeff Beall is doing something useful with his naming and shaming of junk OA journals, but I now realize that he is driven by some sort of fanciful conspiracy theory! "OA is all an anti-capitlist plot." (Even on a quick skim it is evident that Jeff's article is rife with half-truths, errors and downright nonsense. Pity. It will diminish the credibility of his valid exposés, but maybe this is a good thing, if the judgment and motivation behind Beall's list is as kooky as this article! But alas it will now also give the genuine "predatory" junk-journals some specious arguments for discrediting Jeff's work altogether. Of course it will also give the publishing lobby some good sound-bites, but they use them at their peril, because of all the other nonsense in which they are nested!) 
Before I do a critique later today), I want to post some tidbits to set the stage...

Link:

https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind1312&L=JISC-REPOSITORIES&F=&S=&X=3FCEC66BBE1E6754D0&Y=harnad%40ecs.soton.ac.uk&P=5855

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » Amsciforum

Tags:

oa.new jeffrey beall oa.negative

Date tagged:

12/09/2013, 10:19

Date published:

12/09/2013, 05:19