ACADEMIC ATLAS
If there were a Nobel Prize for PATIENCE (NPP) and for answering queries from around the world succinctly—no matter how strangely some of those requests are phrased and how menacing some of those legal threats can be—that award would have to go to Dr. Jeffrey Beall of the University of Colorado Denver.
Jeff, I salute you and only wish we had more researchers and librarians around the globe with your highly developed sense of ethics and your willingness to check and measure regularly each star to see whether it still orbits genuinely around the scholarly universe of open-access publishing or whether it is nothing but an artificial satellite that flashes by in the night and charges princely sums for the privilege of shining with vanity before it disappears into some black hole.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Asteroid_2004_FH.gif
I am sure that you, while looking up the heavens of research possibilities, are aware of each step up that steep hill of academic expectations, each entry carrying a heavy weight of responsibility on your shoulders. I have a sense that your middle name most likely will remain Atlas, the Titan who carries and endures the sky upon his shoulders: genuine, gigantic, but also vulnerable.
http://thepoliticizer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/atlas_rotated.jpg
Don’t give up your good work, no matter how many lawyers from overseas come knocking at your door.
Jeff, I salute you, half a continent away from Colorado.
Henrik Eger
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
