A really, truly bad article about Open Access

If you are looking for a short, easy-to-understand statement that gets absolutely everything about Open Access completely wrong, you can't do much better than this: Hidden cost of open access in Times Higher Education. Luckily, the commenters set it straight. So does Peter Suber, who also adds an important point:

The success of the OA movement means that every day newcomers hear about it for the first time. One of the burdens of that success is that many newcomers pick up and spread old myths about it. If Altbach isn't new to OA issues, then he's inexcusably careless with them, and his claim about peer review is one of the classic myths that newcomers have been picking up and spreading for years.

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That's how zombies are born. There's an incredible willingness of some people to speak up about things they know little or nothing about. I recognise it's tempting, especially for people who grow up with the idea that we can do armchair psychoanalysis of people we don't know -- politicians and celebrities, not to mention neighbors, but we really need to try to control that impulse. I'm sure I fail at that at times, but I do try. Altbach gives no indication of trying at all; it's as though he simply heard the term -- nothing else, just the term -- and promptly wrote an article about it. No research beyond possible gossip with other uninformed people. And it is ironic, as one of the commenters pointed out, that his article would've failed peer review; it would've failed even casual review by a competent editor.

Altbach reaches dizzying heights of laziness by claiming that Open Access does away with peer review and is therefore no better than Wikipedia. Even a cursory review of Open Access publishers, not least PLoS, would have put that misconception snugly to bed. Happily, he gets skewered by the comments, the best of which is John Kirriemuir's: "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..."