Does Green Open Access Rot The Brain?

The title of this post is link bait, of course.  Green OA does not rot the brain and it is reckless and irresponsible even to suggest it.  Heh.  Stranger things, and worse, have happened, even here on the Kitchen, where truth reigns supreme.

But does it rot the brain, maybe, in a manner of speaking, um, perhaps to a degree, or just a little?  Or if the word “rot” is just too strong for you, would it be fair to say that some people sometimes let their guard down?  When we talk about scientific publishing, are we always scientific in our conversation?

Many, many years ago, when the HBO version of Game of Thrones was just a gleam in Papa Time Warner’s eye, I wrote about this on the now-moribund blog Publishing Frontier, which had been put together by my friend Peter Brantley, who even now moderates the immensely influential invitation-only Read 2.0 mailgroup.  You can find that post, “Putting Science into Science Publishing,” here.  My argument was that even when the topic is scientific publishing, the discussion often closely resembles that of the general-purpose Internet and not the more rarefied world where rationality and evidence reign.