SciTechSociety: Beall's Rant

Jeffrey Beall of Beall's list of predatory scholarly publishers recently made some strident arguments against Open Access (OA) in the journal tripleC (ironically, an OA journal). Beall's comments are part of a non-refereed section dedicated to a discussion on OA. Michael Eisen takes down Beall's opinion piece paragraph by paragraph. Stevan Harnad responds to the highlights/lowlights. Roy Tennant has a short piece on Beall in The Digital Shift ... This is the rhetorical style of American extremist right-wing politics that casts every problem as a false choice between freedom and – take your pick – communism or totalitarianism or colonialism or slavery or... European collectivists like George Soros (who became a billionaire by being a free-market capitalist).  For those of us more comfortable with technocratic arguments, politics is not particularly welcome. Yet, we cannot avoid the fact that the OA movement is trying to reform a large socio-economic system. It would be naïve to think that that can be done without political ideology playing a role. But is it really too much to ask to avoid the lowest level of political debate, politics by name-calling?  The system of subscription journals has an internal free-market logic to it that no proposed or existing OA system has been able to replace. In a perfect world, the subscription system uses an economic market to assess the quality of editorial boards and the level of interest in a particular field. Economic viability acts as a referee of sorts, a market-based minimum standard. Some editorial boards deserve the axe for doing poor work. Some fields of study deserve to go out of business for lack of interest. New editorial boards and new fields of study deserve an opportunity to compete. Most of us prefer that these decisions are made by the collective and distributed wisdom of free-market mechanisms.  Unfortunately, the current scholarly-communication marketplace is far from a free market. Journals hardly compete directly with one another. Site licenses perpetuate a paper-era business model that forces universities to buy all content for 100% of the campus community, even those journals that are relevant only to a sliver of the community. Site licenses limit competition between journals, because end users never get to make the price/value trade-offs critical to a functional free market. The Big Deal exacerbates the problem. Far from providing a service, as Beall contends, the Big Deal gives big publishers a platform to launch new journals without competition. Consortial deals are not discounts; they introduce peer networks to make it more difficult to cancel existing subscriptions. [What if Libraries were the Problem?] [Libraries: Paper Tigers in a Digital World]  If Beall believes in the free market, he should support competition from new methods of dissemination, alternative assessment techniques, and new journal business models. Instead, he seems to be motivated more by a desire to hold onto his disrupted job description ..."