[Insight-developers] OPEN ACCESS: The Empire Strikes Back

[Luis Ibanez]

     "Journal publishers lock horns with free-information movement."

        http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070122/full/445347a.html


"... Nature has learned, a group of big scientific publishers has hired
the pit bull [Eric Dezenhall] 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."


"From e-mails passed to Nature, it seems 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."


...


"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."

"Although Dezenhall declines to comment on Skilling and his other
clients, his firm, Dezenhall Resources, was also reported by Business
Week to have used money from oil giant ExxonMobil to criticize the
environmental group Greenpeace. "He's the pit bull of public relations,"
says Kevin McCauley, an editor at the magazine O'Dwyer's PR Report."


....


"We're like any firm under siege," says Barbara Meredith, a
vice-president at the organization. "It's common to hire a PR firm when
you're under siege." She says the *AAP needs to counter messages* from
groups such as the *Public Library of Science (PLoS)*, an *open-access*
publisher and prominent advocate of free access to information. PLoS's
publicity budget stretches to television advertisements produced by
North Woods Advertising of Minneapolis, a firm best known for its role
in the unexpected election of former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura
to the governorship of Minnesota.

The publishers' link with Dezenhall reflects how seriously they are
taking recent developments on access to information. Minutes of a 2006
AAP meeting sent to Nature show that particular attention is being paid
to PubMed Central. Since 2005, the NIH has asked all researchers that it
funds to send copies of accepted papers to the archive, but only a small
percentage actually do. Congress is expected to consider a bill later
this year that would make submission compulsory.

Brian Crawford, a senior vice-president at the American Chemical Society
and a member of the AAP executive chair, says that Dezenhall's
suggestions have been refined and that the publishers have not to his
knowledge sought to work with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. On
the censorship message, he adds: "When 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."



News
Nature
Published online:
24 January 2007;
Corrected online: 25 January 2007
| doi:10.1038/445347a



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   Luis