Quantcast
Channel: Comments for Scholarly Open Access
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 10802

Comment on Respected Swiss Journal Hijacked by Unknown Criminals by Rens W. van der Heijden

0
0

As an avid promotor of online privacy and the protection of websites against censorship, but also a young researcher, this thing really makes it difficult for me to choose sides.

On the one side, the very idea that an arbitrary website can simply be deleted is one that invokes strong emotions for me. Such censorship is almost unthinkable in our current climate of internet freedom. The selective removal of websites by governments (or corporations) is an extremely controversial topic that touches on the very esssence of constitutions in many countries.

On the other hand, this type of abuse (as well as worse cases, such as websites serving malware) is unacceptable. If I can’t trust the web to serve me legitimate pages, how can I get any research done? Where will I find information? One potential good approach is for us researchers to simply take note of the publisher websites and bookmark them. However, this still exposes the public to a variety of pseudo-scientific material.

In conclusion I would say that awareness (through blogs such as yours and other sources of information) is the key towards avoiding these journals. Limited legal action should be possible by forcing hosters to remove such malicious websites: however, I fear that the legal process required is too long to guarantee that we will not see similar problems in the future.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 10802

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images