Institute For The Future

When science publishing goes bad

Nature has a short, yet very disturbing, report [sub req] that the Association of American Publishers has hired a well-known, controversial PR figure to organize a campaign against open access journals:

Eric Dezenhall has made a name for himself helping companies and celebrities protect their reputations, working for example with Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron chief now serving a 24-year jail term for fraud... [and using] money from oil giant ExxonMobil to criticize the environmental group Greenpeace....

Now, Nature has learned, a group of big scientific publishers has hired the pit bull to take on the free-information movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available. Some traditional journals, which depend on subscription charges, say that open-access journals and public databases of scientific papers such as the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) PubMed Central, threaten their livelihoods....

Dezenhall spoke to employees from Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society at a meeting arranged last July by the Association of American Publishers (AAP). A follow-up message in which Dezenhall suggests a strategy for the publishers provides some insight into the approach they are considering taking.

The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as "Public access equals government censorship". He hinted that the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review, and "paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles".

Dezenhall also recommended joining forces with groups that may be ideologically opposed to government-mandated projects such as PubMed Central, including organizations that have angered scientists. One suggestion was the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Washington DC, which has used oil-industry money to promote sceptical views on climate change. Dezenhall estimated his fee for the campaign at $300,000-$500,000.

This strikes me as a profoundly wrong-headed move. One of the curiosities of scientific publishing is that for all the vastness of the publishing world, the ecologies of individual journals is very small: the same people subscribe to the journals, help run the journals, write for the journals, and read the journals. They also sit on library subscription committees and have friends in the open access world. As Princeton librarian David Goodman puts it,

Peer review is not carried out by publishers. It is carried ot completely by scientists--the scientists who submit the papers, the scientists who submit the papers, the scientists who allo them to referees, the scientists who do the refereeing. and the scientists who make the final decision on the basis of the referee's reports. Publishers claim to organize the process, bu it has never been clearly shown just what they do but pay office expenses and purchase the software to keep track of the correspondence.

A campaign that tries to smear the open access movement his will only convince those communities that the most ferocious critics of publishers like Elsevier are right: that those companies have abandoned even the pretense of doing any good in the world, or serving their communities, and simply regard the scientific world as a goose that lays golden eggs.

 

(via Andrew Leonard and Peter Suber)