Open Science

"Do we need a Beall-like blacklist of journals? Even if so, it should be crowd-sourced and not focused on open access only. The irony is that one of the most well-known blogs on open access is authored by a person who has a negative attitude towards any form of opening scholar communication. Jeffrey Beall, the author of “Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers list”, and the the “Scholarly Open Access” blog, which is written in an investigative-like manner, is currently the only authoritative source of knowledge about pseudo-journals. And Beall is focusing on venues that claim to be open access only (despite the fact, that traditional publishers also publish pseudo-science). The very same Jeffrey Beall attacked the open access movement for wanting “to deny the freedom of the press” and more recently called Scielo – an open access platform supported by several Latin American goverments – “a publishing favela”, which is equally false and abhorrent (I don’t think Scielo is ideal, but I also don’t think that someone unprejudiced would name it this way). I’ve responded to Beall’s first attack, but after the Scielo case I’ve decided that writing about him is pointless. However, despite the fact that Beall’s blog is shifting from discussing facts to pure speculation, and it has been clear for some time that it can not be regarded as a credible source of information, Beall’s posts and his list are still widely discussed. This makes me wonder ‘why?’ ..."