Open Access News

Again without trying to be complete, here are some notable recent comments on PRISM.

From John Dupuis at Confessions of a Science Librarian:

...I would like to talk a little about the makeup of The Executive Council of the Professional & Scholarly Publishing Division [which launched PRISM].

Who are the members of this Committee? Sure, the usual suspects, representatives of the major commercial publishers such as a bunch from Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, McGraw Hill, Wolters Kluwer Health, Springer Science + Business Media, SAGE Publications, ISI Thomson Scientific....Given that they are for-profit companies, however, it's not surprising that they would act to protect their profits....

Thank god, you're thinking, that the list above does not include any representatives from scholarly or professional societies. Surely they must understand the importance of free and open access to information, something which can surely only benefit their members, scholarship and society as a whole. Sadly, the Exec Committee also includes members from the IEEE (2, including the chair of the journals committee), American Chemical Society (2, including the chair), American Society of Clinical Oncology, New England Journal of Medicine, Columbia University Press, MIT Press, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Institute of Physics and University of Chicago Press. Unfortunately, scholarly societies see OA as a threat to the income from their publishing programs, which is used to finance all the other membership programs that they have like conferences and continuing education. It's really unfortunate that they can't see past these concerns to what the true interest of their members is: for their research to have as high an impact as possible and, as a byproduct of that impact, to benefit scholarship in their discipline and, hopefully, society as a whole as much as possible....

(See here for a list of all the members organizations of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division. It's basically everybody.)

From Mike Dunford at Questionable Authority:

...If you look closely at the publishing industry's complaints, I think you'll find something interesting. The complaints are really an admission that the billion dollar profits of the academic publishing industry are nothing more than a hidden government subsidy. Your tax dollars are used to conduct the research that is reported in these papers. Your tax dollars are used, in many cases, to pay for portions of the publication process. Your tax dollars are then used to allow other researchers (often funded by your tax dollars) to buy access to that research. The publishing industry is fighting tooth and nail right now to make sure that they get to continue to extract as many government dollars as possible....

From Brandom Keim at Wired Science:

...PRISM was formed, their website tells us, to "protect the quality of scientific research" against policies "that threaten to introduce undue government intervention in science and scholarly publishing, putting at risk the integrity of scientific research." This is an issue of "vital concern" to "scientific, medical and other scholarly researchers ... institutions ... publishers ... physicians, clinicians, engineers and other intellectual pioneers."

So who are the scientists, doctors and intellectual pioneers who've joined PRISM in their noble battle? Well ... um ... there aren't any. At least, none are listed on the website. And while it's arguably unfair to expect a roster of signatories to a week-old group, it's certainly reasonable to expect a few. After all, they do call themselves a coalition.

In fact, it's pretty hard to figure out exactly who is part of PRISM. The only clue is in the contact section: send your mail in care of the Association of American Publishers. That's right, the folks who make their money off yearly journal subscriptions that cost thousands of dollars are the intellectual pioneers of PRISM. It's a classic case of astroturfing....

From Nick Anthis at The Scientific Activist:

...It's understandable that [publishers] are going to try to protect their own interests, but what appears on PRISM's website are outright lies and scare tactics. PRISM claims that the new open access legislation will succeed in "undermining the peer review process" and "opening the door to scientific censorship in the form of selective additions to or omissions from the scientific record." These arguments are so incredibly absurd that I hardly believe anyone in this industry is thick enough to actually believe them. Either this industry group is intentionally and flagrantly misleading the public, or its members are just incredibly clueless....

[M]y beef here is not with the traditional publishers. There are excellent open access journals out there, and there are excellent journals published in the traditional mold. Open access is an exciting and promising new phenomenon, though, and one that the traditional publishers are going to have to adjust to. The methods employed by this new industry group, however, are totally outrageous....

From Madahnuc:

When ideologues trash science and the scientific process it is not news. But when disseminators of scientific knowledge do it, it is appalling....