...Unfortunately, serious conversation [about OA] is ill-served by some publishers’ strategies, including, regrettably, those pursued by the American Chemical Society.
Editorials in Chemical & Engineering News as far back as 2004 denounced OA as "socialized science" -- whatever that is supposed to mean. In 2005 Nobel Laureate Robert J. Richards published an open letter announcing his resignation from ACS out of disgust at the Society's opposition to OA.
In January 2007 Nature (445, 25 January 2007, 347) reported that ACS was among a group of members of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) that hired "pit bull" Eric Dezenhall to attack the Open Access movement. Dezenhall advised the publishers to focus on simple messages (more honestly: simple-minded dissembling slogans), such as "public access equals government censorship." Indeed, ACS senior Vice President Brian Crawford told Nature,"[w]hen any government or funding agency houses and disseminates for public consumption only the work it itself funds, that constitutes a form of selection and self-promotion of that entity's interests." By mid-2007 Dezenhall had founded PRISM ("Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine" – "integrity" is presumably used in the Rovian sense), launched by the Executive Council of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the AAP. This organization proceeded to make, without evidence or plausibility, claims about OA presaged in the Nature account: that it could "undermine the peer review process" and even "open the door to scientific censorship in the form of selective additions to or omissions from the scientific record." Such ludicrous claims led a number of publishers, including Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Columbia University Press, and University of Chicago Press, to disavow PRISM (see e.g. [the Eureka Journal Watch entry on PRISM).
If the ACS regrets its association with PRISM's misstatements, they don’t show it....
If the ACS is to be a party to discussions of OA, they must stop getting their policy advice from PR flacks and start making rational contributions to the discourse. Otherwise they will continue to poison the waters, and deservedly will be accorded no credence.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/15/2008 12:03:00 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.
