Defending Regional Excellence in Research or Why Beall is Wrong About SciELO

I can tell that it’s summer. Edinburgh is plastered in posters for comedy acts, the students have been replaced by tourists and festival goers, and there is a brief lull in the number of publishing conferences. It’s the silly season, where issues have a tendency to resurface and old arguments flare up. One such incident happened last week that resulted in bit of storm in the Twitter and blogosphere. Jeffrey Beall wrote a commentary on the South American aggregator and citation index, SciELO.

There was quite a bit of anger particularly among open access (OA) advocates in response to the post, much of it expressed on Twitter. Many pointed to Beall’s culturally charged use of the word “favela” to describe SciELO, with some accusing Beall of being classist or derogatory. The word racism was used, albeit quite parenthetically.
Authors:  PHILL JONES 
Source: The Scholarly Kitchen
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