Nature's Expose on Publisher's Tactics to Rout Open Access

Jim Giles, writing in a column in Nature 445 (7126): 347 (January 25, 2007) reveals that a major group of sci-tech publishers (reportedly Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society) has hired a pit-bull PR firm to advise them on how to best combat the Open Access movement, particularly PubMed Central. Reportedly the publishers are spending up to a half-million dollars for the advice of Dezenhall Resources, a group that has had as clients in the past such illustrious folks as Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron chief. According to the Nature article, Denzenhall is advising the publishers to give out the message that

"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".

(Via Issues in Scholarly Communication)

Posted by Tom on January 24, 2007