There's been a lot of comment on yesterday's story in Nature on the AAP's new PR campaign against OA. Here's what some bloggers and listserv contributors are saying.
Well, this kind of made my day. Nature is reporting that a group of non open access publishers have hired Eric Dezenhall to help them with public relations. Eric Dezenhall is a crisis management consultant (as well as a fiction author) who many may demonize but he certainly seems to be good at what he does. The article at Nature is worth checking out and points to the desperation of these publishers when they see the writing on the wall regarding Open Access.
That commercial and large society publishers should use such arguments is a sign of the strength and inevitability of the open access movement. But this is the advice [Dezenhall] gave them, not necessarily what they will actually decide to say. In that case, it shows that even an outside advisor perceives the strength and inevitability of the open access movement.
[There's] a frankly depressing report from Nature on "PR's pit bull" discrediting open access publishing....I think we'll see what advice filtered through to the major publishers in public statements/press releases over the next few months. My guess is that - following this expose - they won't be able to use these arguments even if they wanted to.
Scientific publishers launch disinformation campaign against open-access scientific publication. Specifically, they don't want grant agencies to require researchers to make their results public, so they're calling any such requirement "censorship". Newspeak at its best. Sadly, it's not just the usual...commercial scientific publishing houses such as Elsevier and Wiley that are involved: it's also the American Chemical Society. Another great reason to take one's own papers to journals not controlled by these groups.
The Association of American Publishers feels that they are under siege and have hired a pit bull to fight back, apparently. So this isn't really surprising or alarming, but this quote is: "The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as 'Public access equals government censorship'." ...The government censorship bit is absurd....
The whole thing made me think that the AAP and these various publishers are living in the same world as the one portrayed in the movie Thank You For Smoking.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/25/2007 10:33:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
