The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access

Abstract

Abstract:While the open-access (OA) movement purports to be about making scholarly content open-access, its true motives are much different. The OA movement is an anti-corporatist movement that wants to deny the freedom of the press to companies it disagrees with. The movement is also actively imposing onerous mandates on researchers, mandates that restrict individual freedom. To boost the open-access movement, its leaders sacrifice the academic futures of young scholars and those from developing countries, pressuring them to publish in lower-quality open-access journals. The open-access movement has fostered the creation of numerous predatory publishers and standalone journals, increasing the amount of research misconduct in scholarly publications and the amount of pseudo-science that is published as if it were authentic science.

Open Access, Innovation, and Research Infrastructure

“…Jeffrey Beall, the initiator of Beall's list of "predatory" open access publishing, even compares the real OA movement to anti-corporatism and calls for a collectivization of production and an organization of scholarly knowledge solely within academia [28].…”

The Changing Nature of OA Journals: Helping Scholars Identify the Good, the Bad, and the Political

“…As more bogus research continues to be published in open-access venues, the public will access it more and many will accept it as valid research. This bogus research will poison discourse in many scientific fields and will create a public that is misinformed on many scientific issues" (Beall, 2013a). At present, OA proponents don't seem to wish to address this issue.…”

“…In this paper, he groups these "Platinum" OA publishers as those that do not require any form of author processing charge (APC), or fees from the institution. "People who are not experts in a given field generally lack both the ability to understand the most complex research in the field and the ability to distinguish between authentic and bogus research in the discipline" (Beall, 2013a). Despite the many benefits of open access, some are questioning the value of technical articles and materials meant for a specialized discourse community being mandated as open to the public.…”

Bibliography

“…105 This finally spilled over into a full-scale revision of Beall's motivations when, in late 2013, he published an article that accused the OA movement of being an 'anti-corporatist', extreme-Leftist outfit 'that wants to deny the freedom of the press to companies it disagrees with', a radical opinion that separated Beall even from the usually conservative Scholarly Kitchen site (a popular weblog on scholarly communications known for its general scepticism towards the viability of open access). 106 Whether these be financial, scholarly or even political, it is clear that OA is caught between stakeholders with a variety of motivations and levels of power. While these debates continue to rage, they can only be understood in totality through detailed examinations of the contexts within which they take place.…”