...If these folks are worried enough to pay several hundred thousand dollars for [Dezenhall's] help, they clearly think that they have a lot to lose. Let's look at just what that might be....[The censorship] argument is definitely reality-challenged. The last time I checked, neither "selection" nor "self-promotion" comes anywhere close to meaning the same thing as "censorship." That's just a basic fact, and any attempt to argue otherwise represents an assault on both honesty and the English language....Second, the government isn't seeking to nationalize science any more than it already is. The problem from the perspective of the academic publishers is that the government already pays for a hell of a lot of science - NIH estimated that over 60,000 papers that were funded at least in part by specific NIH grants appeared in journals in 2003....[The peer-review argument] is just plain funny. There are already journals (like the PLoS collective) that are peer-reviewed to the same standard as any other scientific journal....
...Do you see what’s going on here? Simple, but bald-faced lies, repeated often. Peer review is not at all limited to “traditional publishing models.” PLoS is a great counterexample. Also, public access is not government censorship, especially if taxpayer dollars paid for the research. I’d call that getting what you pay for....Clearly these guys have hired an expert on crafting statements that seem reasonable but are actually quite deceptive and misleading. Based on the quotes from the involved publishers, they’re already drinking the kool-aid....
...Oh, yeah, the last thing you'd want to do is defend your case on its merits. Which, if anyone was being honest, boil down to, "We've been bilking you suckers for decades with our monopoly on publishing and now that we've got some competition we're being exposed as the whiny money-grubbing pussies we are. And instead of coming up with some kind of justification for our continued existence we'll start a smear campaign." What really torques me off is the blatant dishonesty. Big publishing = peer review. Right. Cuz none of the open access journals offer that. But then it doesn't matter to them if they're right. According to them, as long as they can get us on the defensive, it doesn't matter if we can discredit their statements....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/31/2007 11:41:00 PM.
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.
