The Deceptions Made for OA

The OA movement has played fast and loose with facts, logic, and the truth since its inception, making outsized claims, downplaying or denying downsides, avoiding accountability, and creating villains out of thin air. Its proponents have repeatedly revealed a disrespect for business, ethical, or real-world guardrails, and have posed as superior even while promulgating low-brow and populist ideas.

Just before the holidays, some intellectually offensive — to science, to logic, to fact — pro-OA propaganda was issued by Julia Kostova, Director of Publishing and Head of the U.S. division at Frontiers in what is called an editorial in TIME magazine — or what is left of it.

Not only does she write as an obvious shill for her employer to those of us who know enough to realize this — and this is not the general readership of TIME — but Kostova positions her unrelated educational attainments to make it seem to the uninitiated as if she speaks with some degree of scientific authority — that is, she makes strong declarations about science while asserting a PhD, never noting that her PhD is in French literature.