I recently wrote an article about critical thinking for educators and I'm thinking that a follow-up on scientific reasoning might be a good idea. The machinations in this email exchange on open access journals is a great case in point. Heather Morrison reports that "73% of fully OA journals (about three quarters) do not charge APCs." In a PLOS blog post Hilda Badtian responds that the 73% represents a disproportionate number of journals that do not publish in English, are not indexed in PubMed, or do not issue DOI for the articles. In particular, says Bastian, Heather Morrison's data is "deeply misleading. And it does harm. As long as people can argue that there are just so many options for fee-free publishing, then there will be less of a sense of urgency about eliminating, or at least drastically reducing, APCs." Now that, to me, is a very bad argument for preferring one data set over another. You don't get to pick your data based on the argument you are trying to win. And doing so undermines the use of data in public discourse generally.
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