A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.
Alexander Pope
An Essay on Criticism, 1709Philip G. Altbach is Monan professor of higher education and director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College (USA). He has just published an article on Open Access in THE (Times Higher Education) [Hidden cost of open access].
Professor Altbach complains that the problem with Open Access is the absence of peer review.
Profit, competition and excess have spawned the open-access movement. Academics, librarians and administrators think it is the answer to monopolistic journals. But there are several problems with it. Chief among them is that peer review is eliminated - all knowledge becomes equal. There is no quality control on the internet, and a Wikipedia article has the same value as an essay by a distinguished researcher....This is dead wrong, of course, and the comments on the website make it very clear that Professor Altbach has goofed.
Essentially, open access means there is no objective way of measuring research quality. If the traditional journals and their peer-review systems are no longer operating, anarchy rules. Researchers will have no accurate way of assessing quality in a scholarly publication.
I like this comment ...
Ah, sweet irony. If this article had undergone "peer review", or some other accuracy or quality checking critera, then it would never had seen the light of day...Bora Zivkovic at A Blog Around the Clock is all over it 'cause he's the Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE (Public Library of Science) [A really, truly bad article about Open Access]. The question is ... why would a Professor of higher education at Boston University write an article about Open Access without doing a little bit of investigation to find out about it?
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