Beall’s Bile

"Jeffrey Beall has been on my radar for quite some time. Partly due to comments he has posted on blog posts of mine, but more importantly this piece that he wrote as a contribution to Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front. I’m into criticism as much as the next person, but character assassination? Really? K. R. Roberto claimed to edit the volume, but one wonders if that even included reading the contributions, let alone exercising some professional judgment. Read the chapter and decide for yourself whether he exhibited professional behavior. But that was then. This is now, and in the present day he seems to have dug a much bigger hole and with an entirely new community. His list of “predatory publishers” brought him to the attention of the Open Access community, which includes many people who only knew him through this work. Work that was widely recognized as helpful except by the publishers so named. So you can perhaps imagine the consternation of those working to make the scholarly literature openly available that their supposed friend has turned on them. In an article just published, Beall has taken on the entire Open Access movement by claiming some sort of bizarre conspiracy theory. Here is but one example lifted from his diatribe: 'I do find that the open-access movement is a Euro-dominant one, a neo-colonial attempt to cast scholarly communication policy according to the aspirations of a cliquish minority of European collectivists.' What? ..."