Anti-OA and the Rhetoric of Reaction
You know when someone at Scholarly Kitchen thinks your anti-open
access rant is excessive you’ve crossed some sort
of threshold. You also know that when a biologist and a co-founder
of the Public Library of Science bothers to give your article a thorough
fisking, you have people’s attention. Even Roy
Tennant seems a little riled, and he’s usually
pretty calm. Jeffrey Beall has managed to publish an anti-open
access article in an open access journal that’s so
poorly argued that I wonder if he’ll later use the
publication as an example of how bad OA publishing can be. The
Beall Hoax.
I
was going to write a detailed response pointing out, among other
things, that Beall makes a number of outrageous claims about OA
advocates without referring to or citing any of them. There’s
absolutely no evidence presented that any OA advocates hold any of
the “anti-corporatist” (sic) views that Beall attributes to
them, which leaves the article as an eight-page rant against a straw
man. Beall claims that “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.” Needless to
say, the close analysis never comes. If it had come, this article
would be a serious contribution to the OA discussion instead of an
uninformative rant, especially if it had analyzed representative
passages from numerous OA advocates instead of cherry-picking juicy
but unrepresentative quotes from a handful of alleged zealots. It
wouldn’t have proved anything against OA itself, but it might have
made for a good read.
Because
the argument is unsupported and so extreme, all I have to do to
prove it wrong is to say I’m an open access advocate who doesn’t
support the elimination of private corporations or commercial
publishers or any of the other nonsense views he attributes to
people like me. I’m not a socialist or a collectivist or any of
the other mid-20th century adjectives Beall wants to label me with.
And, unlike some people I might mention, I’m not a zealot. There,
thesis disproved.
After reading Eisen’s
fisking, I don’t see a need for a detailed critique of the
arguments, such as they are. Instead, I want to look at the
rhetoric. Some of you might be familiar with Albert O.
Hirschman’s book The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity,
Futility, Jeopardy, in which he analyzes right-wing rhetoric
from the French Revolution on down and finds three persistent types
of argument.
I have come up with another
triad: that is, with three principal reactive-reactionary theses,
which I call the perversity thesis or thesis of the perverse effect, the futility
thesis, and the jeopardy thesis. According to the perversity thesis,
any purposive action to improve some feature of the political,
social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition
one wishes to remedy. The futility thesis holds
that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they
will simply fail to “make a dent.” Finally, the jeopardy thesis
argues that the code of the proposed chafe or reform is too high as
it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment. (7)
Beall manages to deploy all
these arguments in the course of his article. This shouldn’t be
surprising. For people who have read a lot of conservative
literature, as I have, the clues to a reactionary worldview are
evident throughout the article. For example, Beall claims that
“The open access movement and scholarly open-access publishing
itself are about increasing managerialism.” Eisen had to look that
up, but if he were familiar with mid-twentieth century conservative
political writer James
Burnham, he would have known about Burnham’s 1941 book The
Managerial Revolution. Burnham, a longtime contributor to the
National Review, was once upon a time quite prominent in
conservative circles. Along with the unfounded accusations about
people being collectivists wanting to destroy private enterprise,
Burnham’s work was hot among the right in the 1950s.
This
bit should sound familiar to anyone familiar with the Manichaen
apocalyptic novelist often taken for a political philosopher by
teenage boys, Ayn Rand: “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.” How did we get from wanting open access for
scholarly publishing to wanting to eliminate all private businesses?
Or this: “The open-access movement isn’t really about open
access. Instead, it is about collectivizing production and denying
the freedom of the press from those who prefer the subscription
model of scholarly publishing.” A movement devoted to open
access literature is denying freedom of the press? That’s
perversity in action.
This
makes some sense if you share a Randian worldview. In this
comforting worldview, the world is a simple place to understand.
It’s filled not with flawed human beings acting upon a variety of
motivations trying to make their way through a complex world. No,
the world is made of heroes and villains. The heroes are the people
who think as I do and are always right. The villains are any people
who disagree with any part of my ideology. They do so not because
the world is complicated and disagreement natural, but because they
are evil and possibly stupid, and no matter what noble motives they
might claim to have, they’re lying and trying to destroy some
beloved institution. Also, there’s the faith that commercial
enterprise is always good and free markets (if they ever really
exist) always lead to the best outcome. Challenging this faith in
any way leads to an extreme reaction. It’s a world of extremes.
Criticizing any area in which private enterprise and free markets
maybe don’t give us the outcomes we want is equated with being a
“collectivist” who wants to bring the capitalist system down.
That explains why in the article, criticism of Elsevier or of
commercial science publishing means that one wants to destroy all
corporations. It doesn’t make a lot of sense until you look at it
through the Randian lens.
In
this world, people don’t support open access because they think
the creation and dissemination of new knowledge is a public good.
They do it because they want to destroy all corporations and deny
freedom to people. This must be their motive because they disagree
with Beall about open access scholarship, and he thinks these things
are bad, so they must be motivated by these evil ideas. Q.E.D. Since
there have to be heroes and villains, Beall must be the hero and
everyone who disagrees with him in the slightest a villain who is
acting from evil motives to destroy everything he holds dear. Once
you share this worldview, evidence doesn’t matter anymore.
The
Hirschman theses show up as well. Let’s take a look at some
passages trying to find the perversity, futility, and jeopardy
theses.
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.
This
is a good example of the perversity thesis in action. Predatory
gold-OA publishers exist and they exploit people and harm scholarly
publishing, and it’s all the fault of OA advocates. This isn’t
what the OA advocates promised us! This is bad! We can all agree
that it’s bad, but it takes a special kind of logic to say that
because some bad people do bad things with OA that all OA is thus
bad. In informal reasoning, it’s called the “guilt by
association” fallacy.
One
of the headings in the article claims that “Gold Open Access is
Failing.” As Eisen notes, “This is the worst form of
cherry-picking. Open access publishing is ‘failing’ because one
open access publisher that published an insignificant number of
papers went out of business?” Not really much evidence for it. But
it might be an example of the futility thesis. Nothing good will
come from OA scholarly publishing. It’s a futile effort that will
merely result merely in more “predatory” publishers. Beware OA
publishing!
The
jeopardy thesis is pervasive. Scholarship is in jeopardy because of
predatory publishers. Public access to good science is in jeopardy
because of…predatory publishers. The tenure process for young
scholars is in jeopardy because “Some tenured open-access
advocates are pressuring young scholars away from submitting their
work to traditional journals, sacrificing them to the open-access
movement.” We don’t know who these tenured open-access advocates
or pressured young scholars are because none of them are named, so
we’ll just have to take Beall’s word for it. Oh, and the careers
of scientists in developing countries are also in jeopardy: “OA
advocates are also pressuring scientists in developing countries to
publish in OA journals, and this could hurt their careers.” Again,
we don’t know who these scientists are, but we’re assured their
careers could be in jeopardy.
The
free-market perfection of commercial science publishing is in
jeopardy from gold-OA as well: “The act of instituting financial
transactions between scholarly authors and scholarly publishers is
corrupting scholarly communication. This was one of the great
benefits of the traditional scholarly publishing system – it had
no monetary component in the relationship between publishers and
their authors.” That’s one of the benefits, and since there are
absolutely no burdens in the traditional system, OA advocates are
trying to jeopardize a perfect system. That’s bad! Beall
grasps tightly to every scrap of evidence that might support his
anti-OA crusade and ignores everything else that doesn’t support
it. He argues like a trial lawyer when he should be arguing like a
scholar. If he fairly considered the evidence for and against
both traditional publishing and OA publishing, or even acknowledged
the obvious fact that commercial scholarly publishing has some
problems, it might be possible to engage in a discussion, but
that’s impossible here.
I’ve
analyzed some rhetoric because of the lack of arguments and evidence
supporting the claims about OA advocates, but there seems to be a
certain logic to Beall’s overall mission. Here’s the argument in
syllogistic terms as I infer it:
Some
OA publishing is predatory publishing.
All predatory publishing is bad.
Therefore, all OA publishing is bad.
The
problem is, that’s an invalid argument. My study of formal logic
was long enough ago that I can’t remember the exact name for the
problem, but the error consists in moving from “some OA” to
“all OA.” Thus, informally, his reasoning fails because he
provides no analysis of any OA advocates while making sweeping and
sometimes absurd claims about them. Formally, his reasoning fails
because when put in the form of a syllogism it’s invalid. Thus,
the overall argument, as put here, is neither sound nor valid. If we
look at this as an argument against OA, as it seems to be intended,
it fails, but as a rare example of right-wing political rhetoric
from a librarian it’s kind of fascinating.
Finally, Beall approaches OA
advocates the same way he claims they approach OA. Referring to the
response to an article about predatory OA journals, Beall claims,
“The attack on Bohannon was carried out with a near religious
fervour. OA advocates will do anything to protect the image of
open-access.” If anything has a religious fervor, it’s this
self-righteous crusade against OA advocates that paints them all as
villains. This,
by the way, was my response to that article and the discourse
surrounding it. Somehow I managed to say that predatory publishers
are bad and OA good without religious fervor or zealotry. I pointed
out that the fact that predatory OA publishers exist is no evidence
whatsoever that OA publishing is inherently bad, so any fuss was for
nought. Only people who can’t reason soundly would try to make
that claim, which might be what some OA advocates feared. Perhaps
there were OA advocates who attacked Bohannon with religious fervor,
although no evidence is given for that. But if there were, that
doesn’t make all OA advocates into zealots or OA publishing bad.
It’s like saying that because some anti-OA crusaders produce
unsubstantiated attacks on OA advocates or mistakenly argue that all
OA publishing is bad because some OA publishing is bad somehow
proves that OA is inherently good. Neither argument makes much
sense.
(7)
THOUGHTS ON “ANTI-OA AND THE RHETORIC OF REACTION”
waltcrawford on December
18, 2013 at 4:05 pm said:
I
love your first sentence here; it was my immediate reaction, but I
didn’t blog about it. Good post in general. I’d also say I’m
an OA supporter who’s neither socialist nor collectivist–but
since I believe in public libraries, Social Security and Medicare,
and since I’m a California native, I probably count as both in
some peoples’ minds. Anyway: Good job.
Reply ↓
Wayne
Bivens-Tatumon December
18, 2013 at 4:15 pm said:
Thanks,
Walt. I’m still not convinced this article wasn’t a hoax of some
sort.
Stevan
Harnad on December
18, 2013 at 8:20 pm said:
Cameo
Replies to Beall’s List of Howlers
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1087-.html
Reply ↓
Pingback: The
OA discussion gets hot(ter) | Libraries are for Use
Jeanne
A. Pawitan on January
17, 2014 at 9:35 am said:
A
friend sent me these 2 blogs about Mr Beall:
http://fakeconferences.blogspot.com/2013/11/prof-nicola-bellomo-sent-us-this-email.html
http://iaria-highsci.blogspot.com/
I
wonder if it is true.

Yes
they are true. Absolutely true.
Please visit http://www.scholarlyoa.net/
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