Free Journals? Um, No. Somebody Get Us a PR Firm
Greg Dahlmann, who is rapidly becoming Captain Insightful and Visionary in Chief around AMBI as we create the Borg Cube of Bioethics Blogdom (boy would he hate it if he saw this post), alerted me to this hillarious/horrifying post on Poynteronline about the response of major science journals to the "open access" movement. PR guy extraordinaire Eric Dezenhall helped out a lot with some great arguments, if what you mean by great arguments is "sounds like a Republican presidential campaign piece":Nature said that Dezenhall advised the science publishers 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 unlikely allies such as the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute -- which, in addition to being a vocal critic of mainstream climate change science, reportedly opposes government-mandated science information projects such as PubMed Central.
Labels: ethics of publication, no such thing as a free lunch
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The part of the Nature article that really roiled me was in the last paragraph:
'On the censorship message, he[Brian Crawford] 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."'
Which is totally out of line to say, because PubMedCentral will house any biomedical literature, regardless of what entity funded it:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/about/faq.html#q10
"Who may contribute to PubMed Central?
PubMed Central will accept material from any life sciences journal that meets NLM's standards for the archive. A journal must qualify on two levels: on the scientific and editorial quality of its content, and on the technical quality of its digital files.
Certain research funding agencies also have policies (NIH Public Access and Wellcome Trust Open Access) that designate PMC as the repository for articles arising out of research funded by them. In these cases, PMC will accept applicable articles directly from eligible researchers. These individuals frequently deposit their final, peer reviewed author manuscripts."
Hopefully, somebody from PubMedCentral calls them on it.
- by Brian Haugen on Jan 29, 2007 at 1:38 AM | link