Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, has come to some fame in science publication circles for highlighting the growing number of “predatory” open access publishers and curating a list<\/a> of them. His work has provided a useful service to people seeking to navigate the sometimes confusing array of new journals – many legitimate, many scammers – that have popped up in the last few years.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, as he has gained some degree of notoriety, it turns out he isn’t just trying to identify bad open access publishers – he is actively trying to discredit open access publishing in general. There were signs of this before, but any lingering doubt that Beall is a credible contributor to the discourse on science publishing was erased with an article<\/a> he published last week. The piece is so ill-informed and angry that I can’t really describe it. So I’m just going to reproduce his article here (it was, ironically, published in an open access journal with a Creative Commons license allowing me to do so), along with my comments<\/p>\n The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access<\/b><\/p>\n Jeffrey Beall<\/p>\n Auraria Library, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, Colorado, USA, <\/i>jeffrey.beall@ucdenver.edu<\/i><\/a>, <\/i>http:\/\/scholarlyoa.com<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n Abstract<\/b><\/p>\n While the open-access (OA) movement purports to be about making scholarly content open-access, its true motives are much different.\u00a0The OA movement is an anti-corporatist movement that wants to deny the freedom of the press to companies it disagrees with.<\/p>\n It is rather amusing to hear open access described as “anti-corporatist” seeing as the primary push for open access has come from corporations such as PLOS \u00a0and BioMed Central, a for profit company recently purchased by one of the world’s largest publishing houses.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n Introduction<\/b><\/p>\n If you ask most open-access (OA) advocates about scholarly publishing, they will tell you that we are in a crisis situation. Greedy publishers have ruined scholarly communication, they’ll claim, placing work they obtained for free behind expensive paywalls, locking up research that the world needs to progress.<\/p>\n Yes. We will say that. Because it is completely, and unambiguously true.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The OA zealots will explain how publishers exploit scholars, profiting from the research, manuscripts, and peer review that they provide for free to the publishers, who then turn around and sell this research back to academic libraries in the form of journal subscriptions.<\/p>\n Again. Completely true. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n They will also tell you that Elsevier, the worst of the worst among publishers, actually created bogus journals to help promote a large pharmaceutical company’s products. Imagine the horror. Because of this, we can never trust a subscription publisher again. Ever.<\/p>\n Elsevier did do this. But this has never been part of the argument for open access.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Moreover, the advent of the Internet means that we really don’t need publishers anymore anyway. We can self-publish our work or do it cooperatively. Libraries can be the new publishers. All we have to do is upload our research to the Internet and our research will be published, and the big publishers will wither up and die freeing up academic library budgets and creating a just and perfect system of scholarly publishing.<\/p>\n Yup. That’s pretty much it. Of course it’s not that simple. Nobody thinks this new system will just happen organically. I and many others have proposed systems to fund publishing and manage peer review without subscription-based journals.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The story those promoting OA tell is simple and convincing. Unfortunately, the story is incomplete, negligent, and full of bunk. I’m an academic crime fighter (Bohannon 2013b). I am here to set the record straight.<\/p>\n Phew. I’m glad someone’s on the case.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The logic behind the open-access movement is so obvious, simple, and convincing that no one could disagree with it, except that OA advocates don’t tell the whole story. Open access will grant free access to research to everyone, including research-starved people in the Global South who have never read a scholarly article before. How could anyone oppose that? It will also allow everyone who has ever had the frustration of hitting a paywall when seeking a research article to access virtually everything for free, or so they claim.<\/p>\n What the Open-Access Movement is Really About<\/b><\/p>\n The open-access movement is really about anti-corporatism. OA advocates want to make collective everything and eliminate private business, except for small businesses owned by the disadvantaged.<\/p>\n I don’t even know what to say about this. Forget about the self-delusion that leads Beall to think he can intuit what my and other OA advocates intentions have been. It’s just a factually ludicrous statement. The OA movement was born, and continues to be driven, by corporations – most of them for profit corporations – who are seeking to build businesses that better serve their customers. Does Beall think Google is anti-corporatist and anti-profit because they are trying to drive small newspapers out of business? \u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n They don’t like the idea of profit, even though many have a large portfolio of mutual funds in their retirement accounts that invest in for-profit companies.<\/p>\n So not only are we anti-corporatist, we’re bad investors too?\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Salaries of\u00a0academics in the United States have increased dramatically in the past two decades, especially among top professors and university administrators. OA advocates don’t have a problem with this, and from their high-salaried comfortable positions they demand that for-profit, scholarly journal publishers not be involved in scholarly publishing and devise ways (such as green open-access) to defeat and eliminate them.<\/p>\n No. I and other open access proponents see a publishing system that is expensive, slow and ineffective and that needlessly denies access to countless people in the US and elsewhere who would benefit directly and indirectly from access to the scholarly literature. Yes, we oppose publishers who employ the outdated subscription model. But not because they are corporations. It’s because what they are doing is bad for science and bad for the public. Disagree with that assessment if you will, but please spare me the anti-corporatist garbage.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The open-access movement is a negative movement rather than a positive one. It is more a movement against something than it is a movement for something. Some will respond that the movement is not against anything; it is just for open access. But a close analysis of the discourse of the OA advocates reveals that the real goal of the open access movement is to kill off the for-profit publishers and make scholarly publishing a cooperative and socialistic enterprise. It’s a negative movement.<\/p>\n From day 1, open access has been about a very specific alternative to the existing subscription model. Yes, by definition every effort to replace one business model with another will always have a negative aspect to it. But to deny that there is a positive aspect to OA is silly. What is PLOS? What is BMC?\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This kind of movement, a movement to replace a free market with an artificial and highly regulated one, rarely succeeds.<\/p>\n The current publishing system a free market? How can Beall, a librarian for 23 years, say this with a straight face? There is no free market. Today scientists are all buy compelled – by both real and imagined expectations of hiring, funding and promotion committees – to publish their work in a small number of elite journals. These journals then effectively have a monopoly on proving access to content which scientists need to do their work. And they use their monopoly power to sell back this content to universities and other research institutions and massively inflated prices. There is little choice on the part of researchers to not participate in the system. And little choice on the part of institutions to opt out of subscriptions. This is not a free market that anyone who actually understands or cares about free markets would recognize.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In fact, the gold open-access model actually incentivizes corruption, which speed the path to failure. The traditional publishing model, where publishers lived or died on subscriptions, encouraged quality and innovation. Publishers always had to keep their subscribers happy or they would cancel.<\/p>\n Really? Quality and innovation? Twenty years since the birth of the modern internet scholarly journals basically publish electronic versions of their old print journals that are nearly identical in format, layout and content to their pre-internet editions. And this stasis actually represents progress compared to what has happened with article submission. It used to be easy to submit a paper to a journal. You printed it out and put it in the mail. Now it takes hours to go through web portals that are more complicated – and less efficient – than healtcare.gov.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Indeed, scholarly publishing is one of the least innovative industries on the planet. And why? Precisely because they have absolutely no incentive to innovate because there is not a free market in subscriptions. Indeed, the structure of the industry actively discourages innovation because the people who make the important decisions about where to publish their articles – researchers – are not the people who pay the bills for journals. I have watched over a decade of efforts on the part of the University of California libraries to cut costs by canceling subscriptions, and not once has published innovation every come up in discussions. Why? Because authors don’t give a hoot about innovation – they care about getting their work in the most high-profile journal, and that’s it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Similarly, a movement that tries to force out an existing technology and replace it with a purportedly better one also never succeeds.\u00a0Take the Semantic Web for example. It has many zealous advocates, and they have been promoting it for many years. Some refer to the Semantic Web as Web 3.0. However, despite intense promotion, it has never taken off. In fact, it is moribund. The advocates who promoted it spent a lot of time and blog space cheerleading for it, and they spent a lot of time trashing technologies and standards it was supposed to replace. In fact, that was what they did the most, badmouthing existing technologies and those who supported and used them. One example was a library standard called the MARC format. This standard was ridiculed so much it’s a wonder it still even exists, yet is still being used successfully by libraries world- wide, and the semantic web is dying a slow death. Open access publishing is the “Semantic Web” of scholarly communication.<\/p>\n What a load of nonsense. Yes. The semantic web failed. But if movements to replace existing technology with better ones never succeeded I would be chiseling this blog post out on cave walls.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The open access movement and scholarly open-access publishing itself are about increasing managerialism (Grayson 2013). Wherever there is managerialism, there is an increased use of onerous management tactics, including mandatory record keeping, rationing of resources, difficult approval processes for things that ought to be freely allowed, and endless committee meetings, practices that generally lead to cronyism.<\/p>\n Had to look managerialism\u00a0up, and I still don’t understand what he’s talking about. It seems like, again, Beall is operating under the patently false notion that scholarly research and scholarly publishing are some kind of idea free market. In reality we already operate under very strict controls tied to our funding (he should see the paperwork tied to NIH grants), strict rationing of resources and difficult approval processes for things that out to be freely allowed (e.g. reading papers) as well as endless committee meetings. But I fail to see what this has to do with publishing. And does Beall really think the current journal system is free of cronyism??? Wake up man. Scholarly journals are amongst the clubbiest institutions on the planet.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The traditional publishing model had the advantage of there being no monetary transactions between scholarly authors and their publishers. Money, a source of corruption, was absent from the author-publisher relationship (except in the rare case of reasonable page charges levied on authors publishing with non-profit learned societies) in the traditional publishing model.<\/p>\n If you think that systems in which one group of people make the key decisions about what to buy and another group pays the bills are the perfect way to structure an economic system, I suggest you study military purchasing systems where generals decide what they want to buy and Congress just writes a check. That works out really well. Or maybe I should let my kids decide what kind of things we should by at the grocery or toy stores without a budget. THIS is what the economics of scholarly publishing are like today. The system is utterly and completely corrupt in that authors make a transaction with a journal in which they get something valuable – a citation – knowing that someone else if going to pay the bills. What on Earth do you call a system in which a small group of people receive something of great value that they make taxpayers pay for besides corrupt?<\/span><\/p>\n And, the “rare case of reasonable page charges levied on authors publishing with non-profit learned societies” is just ignorant. Page charges for publishing in subscription based journals are neither rare nor reasonable. Indeed the page charges levied by many journals – especially top tier and society journals – exceed the costs of publishing in open access journals.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Managerialism is the friend of those who want to restrict freedom and advancement. It is a tool for creating malevolent bureaucracies and academic cronyism. Managerialism is the logical and malevolent extension of office politics, and it will hurt scholarly communication. Many universities subsidize or pay completely for their faculty members’ article processing charges when they submit to gold (author pays) open-access journals. The management of the funds used to pay these charges will further corrupt higher education. The powerful will have first priority for the money; the weak may remain unfunded. Popular ideas will receive funding; new and unpopular ideas, regardless of their merit, will remain unfunded. By adding a financial component to the front end of the scholarly publishing process, the open-access movement will ultimately corrupt scholarly publishing and hurt the communication and sharing of novel knowledge.<\/p>\n Again, what world is Beall living in where unpopular ideas are littered with funding and have journals lining up to publish them? The system we have today in which journals compete based on their “impact factor” all but ensures that unpopular ideas are relegated to the most obscure corners of the publishing world. One of the long-term advantages of reforming scholarly publishing is that it will – by removing the monopolistic control publishers have today – \u00a0make publishing less expensive and accessible. Do we need to be careful that we don’t create a new system where only the powerful can publish their work? Yes. But to argue that the current system isn’t already plagued by this problem is ludicrous.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n I have been called many things in my life. But “politically correct” is not one of them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The open-access advocates have cleverly used and exploited political correctness in the academy to work towards achieving their goals and towards manipulating their colleagues into becoming open-access advocates. One of the ways they’ve achieved this is through the enactment of open-access mandates. The strategy involves making very simple arguments to faculty senates at various universities in favour of open- access and then asking the faculties to establish the mandates. These mandates usually require that faculty use either the gold or green models of open-access publishing. OA advocates use specious arguments to lobby for mandates, focusing only on the supposed economic benefits of open access and ignoring the value additions provided by professional publishers. The arguments imply that publishers are not really needed; all researchers need to do is upload their work, an action that constitutes publishing, and that this act results in a product that is somehow similar to the products that professional publishers produce.<\/span><\/p>\n This is just a complete mischaracterization of open access mandates and the discussions around them. Indeed virtually all open access mandates enacted to date have been explicitly structured – much to my chagrin – so as not to threaten subscription based publishers. Virtually all of them contain embargo periods, typically of a year, before works are made freely available. Most contain opt out provisions for scholars who want to publish in journals that are incompatible with the policy. And none contain any kind of enforcement mechanism or penalties.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Nothing could be further from the truth, and the existence of the predatory publishers, the focus of my research, is evidence of this. It’s likely that hundreds or even thousands of honest researchers have fallen prey to the predatory publishers, those open-access publishers that exploit the gold open-access model just for their own profit, pretending to be legitimate publishing operations but actually accepting any and all submissions just for the money. Institutional mandates feed into and help sustain predatory publishers. These journals are terrible and need to be eliminated. And Beall’s efforts to catalog them are an important part of this. But, while there are many such journals, they constitute a small fraction of published papers. And by focusing exclusively on scammy OA publishers, Beall ignores the far bigger problem of the many subscription journals (usually run by big for-profit publishers) that also publish more or less anything submitted to them in the name of driving up their volumes and justifying increased subscription fees. If you are going to blame unscrupulous OA publishers on institutional mandates, then you have to also blame the broader “publish or perish” culture for bottom-feeding subscription journals.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Thus there are conscientious scholars, trying to follow the freedom-denying mandates imposed on them by their faculty representatives, who get tricked into submitting their good work to bogus journals.<\/span><\/p>\n OR, you have conscientious scholars who believe that publishing in open access journals is the right thing and have been tricked into submitting to bogus journals.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Again, I think these journals suck. I agree with Beall that we need to expose and eliminate them. But this can very easily be done without discarding open access publishing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n There are numerous open-access advocates who promote scholarly open-access publishing without warning of the numerous scam publishers that operate all around the world. I find this promotion negligent. Anyone touting the benefits of open-access and encouraging its adoption ought also to warn of the numerous and increasing scams that exist in the scholarly publishing industry.<\/span><\/p>\n I agree with this. This is why PLOS and many other legitimate OA publishers formed the\u00a0Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association<\/a> to establish a code of conduct<\/a> for OA publishers, and to create effective procedures to certify that publishers adhere to these standards.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n I believe many OA advocates ignore the known problems with scholarly open-access publishing because they don’t want to frighten people away from it. This is the moral equivalent of selling someone a used car with the knowledge the engine block is cracked, without informing the buyer. <\/span><\/p>\n That’s a ridiculous metaphor. It’s not like selling a used car with a hidden defect. It’s more like encouraging people to invest their money without warning them about Nigerian banking scams. But I agree that we should all make people aware that there are problematic publishers and how people can recognize them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Most descriptions and explanations of open-access publishing are idealistic and unrealistic. They tout the benefits but ignore the weaknesses. Many honest scholars have been seriously victimized by predatory publishers, and as a community we must help others, especially emerging researchers, avoid becoming victims. Pushing open access without warning of the possible scams is not helpful. In fact, it can be downright damaging to a scholar’s career. For example, once a researcher unwittingly submits a paper to a predatory publisher, it is usually quickly published. Sometimes this fast publishing is the researcher’s first clue that something is amiss. But by then it’s too late, as once a paper is published in a predatory journal, no legitimate journal will be interested in publishing it. When this happens to early career researchers, it can have long-term negative effects on their careers.<\/span><\/p>\n Again, this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Yes, this is a problem, but it’s a small, and easily fixable one. Saying we should discard OA publishing because of these bad actors is like saying we should abandon Obamacare because some insurers have tried to exploit it in dishonest ways.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n I have observed that the advocates promoting open access do not want to hear any criticisms of the movement of the open-access publishing models, and they quickly attack anyone who questions the open-access or highlights its weaknesses. Open-access advocates are polemics; they have an “us versus them” mentality and see traditional publishers as the bad guys.<\/span><\/p>\n I have always answered questions about PLOS and OA publishing honestly, and have spoken out repeatedly about what I see are its weaknesses and where it has not achieved its potential. However, I am also quick to point out the far greater weaknesses in the current system, and the often erroneous statements made against OA publishing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n I do not agree with this at all. These publishers cast a negative light on those publishers. Most researchers know who the legitimate OA publishers are, and I have seen no evidence that the existence of these scam publishers has hurt PLOS’s reputation at all. In fact, it seems like it has had the opposite effect, with researchers gaining an appreciation for the degree of rigor PLOS puts into its review system.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I notice that Beall isn’t arguing that the existence of scam conferences casts a negative light on all scholarly conferences. Why is this? They use the same business model. It’s sometimes hard to tell which ones are good and which are bad? Is it perhaps because the logical connection he’s trying to draw between bad OA journals and all OA journals is bad.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The gold open-access model in particular is flawed; there are only a few publishers that employ the model ethically, and many of these are cutting corners and lowering their standards because they don’t have to fear losing subscribers.<\/span><\/p>\n It would be helpful if he were specific about who he thinks is being unethical and who is cutting corners.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n On October 4, 2013, Science magazine published an article by John Bohannon (2013b) that related what the author learned from a sting operation he conducted on open-access publishers. The sting operation, which used my list of predatory publishers and the Directory of Open Access Journals as sources of journals, found that many journals accepted papers without even doing a peer review, and many did a peer review and accepted the unscientific article Bohannon baited them with anyway.<\/span><\/p>\n Here again, the open-access advocates came out swinging, breaking into their “us versus them” stance, and attacking Bohannon, some- times personally, for not including subscription journals in his study. Subscription journals were not part of his research question, however, but that didn’t stop the many strident critics\u00a0of Bohannon’s work, who acted almost instinctively according to their Manichaean view of traditional and open-access publishing. He didn’t need to gather data about traditional publishers; that wasn’t what he was studying. If you are counting cars, you don’t need to count airplanes as a control. Also, OA advocates often brag about the continually-increasing number of open-access outlets, predicting that traditional publishers will soon be eclipsed. So if the traditional publishers are nearly extinct, why bother to study them?<\/span><\/p>\n The attack on Bohannon was carried out with a near religious fervour. OA advocates will do anything to protect the image of open-access. They don’t care that the number of predatory publishers is grow- ing at a near-relativistic speed; all they care about is that public perception of scholarly open access be kept positive. Bohannon was interviewed by The Scholarly Kitchen contributor Phil Davis on November 12, 2013. Summarizing the reaction of the open-access advocate community to his sting, Bohannon said, “I learned that I have been too naive and idealistic about scientists. I as- sumed that the results [of my study] would speak for themselves. There would be disagree- ments about how best to interpret them, and what to do about them, but it would be a civil discussion and then a concerted, rational, community effort to address the problems that the results reveal. But that is far from what happened. Instead, it was 100% political and many scientists that I respected turned out to be the most cynical political operators of all” (Bohannon 2013a). <\/span><\/p>\n Interpreting the reaction to Bohannon’s sting article publisher Kent Anderson, the president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing and former chief editor of the blog The Scholarly Kitchen commented, “\u2026 don\u2019t expect rational, calm, reasoned assessments from the likes of Eisen, Solomon, or others [open access advocates]. They’ve demonstrated they are ideologues that are quite willing to attack anyone who they view as falling outside their particular view of OA orthodoxy. How they are able to continue to deny what is actually happening is beyond me” (Anderson 2013).<\/span><\/p>\n I won’t speak for others, but since Beall calls me out by name, I would like to point out that on my blog and in a forum sponsored by Science, I accepted the results of Bohannon’s story and said repeatedly that these journals are a problem. However, Beall and Bohannon’s efforts to paint his article as an innocent exploration of a problem in publishing are absurd. I won’t rehash the whole debate here. But go back and look at the press release and the things Bohannon and others wrote after the article appeared – they were clearly spinning the article in order to get in wider attention. And, of course, OA advocates responded in kind. \u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n When he served as the chief editor of The Scholarly Kitchen blog, Anderson was a frequent target of criticism from open-access zealots. I think this analysis from him sums up the attitude and actions of open access advocates quite well: “The attacks we\u2019ve received when we\u2019ve talked about OA have been surprisingly vitriolic and immature, even when we\u2019ve said some things that were intended to point out issues the OA community might want to think about, in a helpful way. Some people really have a hair-trigger about anything short of complete OA cheerleading” (Anderson 2012).<\/span><\/p>\n Anyone who follows Anderson and The Scholarly Kitchen know that he is on a years-long crusade to discredit open access publishing. I don’t know anyone who takes him seriously anymore.\u00a0Yes, his posts inspire heated responses. That’s because he is a classic internet troll whose posts – with a selective use of facts that would make Fox News proud, and consistent questioning of the wisdom and intentions of open access proponents – are crafted to piss people off. And like more trolls, he succeeds in eliciting the kind of antagonistic comments on which he seems to get off. It’s too bad, because amidst the anti open-access rhetoric, Anderson can be coherent, sometimes makes good points, and has an interesting perspective on publishing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n One of the arguments that OA advocates use is that a lot of research is publically funded; therefore, the public deserves access to the research for free. This argument is true more in Europe more so than in the United States because collectivism is more institutionalized there. However, there are a lot of things that are publically funded that are not free, both in Europe and North America. Public transportation is one example. If OA advocates stuck to their principles, they would also be demanding that all publically owned buses and trains are free to all users. Their argument also completely ignores all the ways that publishers add value to information. This is done by selecting the best research for publication, managing the peer review process, managing ethics, maintaining servers, digital preservation, and the like. There are plenty of government-funded things that are not free, especially things to which the private sector adds value.<\/span><\/p>\n Beall is being willfully disingenuous here. His main critique about open access publishing is that the direct exchange of money between scientists and publishers corrupts the process. But then he accuses open access advocates of wanting publishing to be free. What does he think that OA publishing fees are for? <\/span><\/p>\n From the very beginning I and most other OA advocates have explicitly pointed out that publishing has costs, and that those costs need to be covered by the research community. The goal of OA publishing is not to deny the costs, but rather to pay for them in a different way. Science funders can pay a fee for access (as is currently done) , they can pay a fee to publish (as PLOS and other OA publishers do), or they could just subsidize the whole thing with no transaction cost (as eLife does – this the model I ultimately favor).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n For what it’s worth, I do think buses and trains should be free for all users. This would clearly accomplish an important public good – reducing the use of cars – whose economic and non-economic benefits would far far outweigh the costs (see [1<\/a>][2<\/a>][3<\/a>][4<\/a>]).<\/span><\/p>\n
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\nThe open-access movement was born of political correctness, the dogma that unites and drives higher education. <\/span><\/p>\n
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\n<\/span>In April 2008 [sic – it was 2013]<\/span>, an article about predatory publishers appeared in the New York Times (Kolata 2013). The article described predatory publishers and predatory conferences. Immediately upon publication of the article, OA advocates sprang into action, questioning the article and its reporting. Numerous blog posts appeared, many attempting to cast doubt on the arti- cle. One perhaps slightly paranoid blog post was entitled “Did Commercial Journals Use the NYT to Smear Open Access?” (Bollier 2013). The fact is the predatory publishers do cast a negative light on all of scholarly open-access publishing. <\/span><\/p>\n
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