Category Archives: Policy

American publishers hire a “pit bull”

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The most startling news this week, picked up from Peter Suber’s Open Access News and then in Slashdot draws attention to an article by Jim Giles in Nature: PR’s pit bull takes on Open Access. In this article, which is available online (thanks are due to Nature), it emerges that the Association of American publishers and some of their members, including Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society have apparently hired a PR agent to defend them against what they see as a threat to their livelihood from open access publishing. The devil, though, is in the detail – the detail of whom they have hired.

As Jim Giles writes:

The author of Nail ‘Em! Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses is not the kind of figure normally associated with the relatively sedate world of scientific publishing. Besides writing the odd novel, 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 Exxon Mobil 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.

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.

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)….

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….

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%u2013500,000.

In an enthusiastic e-mail sent to colleagues after the meeting, Susan Spilka, Wiley’s director of corporate communications, said Dezenhall explained that publishers had acted too defensively on the free-information issue and worried too much about making precise statements. Dezenhall noted that if the other side is on the defensive, it doesn’t matter if they can discredit your statements, she added: “Media massaging is not the same as intellectual debate.

Officials at the AAP would not comment to Nature on the details of their work with Dezenhall, or the money involved, but acknowledged that they had met him and subsequently contracted his firm to work on the issue.

It is worth reading the Nature article in full. I remain open-mouthed. At least, I suppose, it means that open access is serious enough for the publishers to see it as a threat and that is a good thing. However, for scholarly publishers to be caught out in
such an expedient exercise of truth-bending is another matter – all the more so in the intellectual environment in which they operate. I am particularly surprised at Wiley, which in my dealings with it in the past has emerged as a company with a concern for quality and the ability to think out of the box – to an extent unusual among their peers. So to see them descend to tactics such as this is disappointing. I would have thought that a company like Wiley should have the nerve and the intelligence to
ride the wave, to learn where scholarly publishing is heading and position themselves ahead of the game. I do believe there is a role for good publishers in the Open Access movement and I also believe that Open Access is the way scholarly publishing is going.

Surely, also, these publishers should be paying more attention to their client base. That is where they need good and intelligent PR. The peer reviewers they are using as fodder for their (false) arguments are volunteers from the universities, as are their authors. Their customers, the university libraries, are unhappy with the very high inflation rate of their products, the students in the USA are complaining about the price of textbooks. Should they not be focusing their PR efforts in that direction?

I suppose the bottom-line question, addressed to the academic community that provides these people with their living is the classic one: ‘Would you buy a used car from someone like this?’ Are these to be the guardians of the quality of your scholarship?

Ensuring access to your scholarly publications – practical steps for authors

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South African academics are encouraged by national policy for publication reward to publish in accredited journals, with overseas journals considered the most prestigious. Leaving aside for a moment any critique of this policy, how can the successful authors ensure that the knowledge they have generated is not
priced right out of the market for their colleagues and fellow-citizens? This is a real issue, given that the subscription prices of the big commercial journals have risen at about double the rate of inflation in the last decade. Even large and well-endowed universities are struggling to keep up their subscriptions to the
leading journals (let alone all 24,000 journals out there), so it is no surprise that South African universities don’t subscribe to a number of the journals in which their academics publish.

This came home to me when a colleague, Dick Ng’ambi, emailed to his department the other day ‘Maybe Eve Gray has a point. I’ve just received this alert from Springer alerting me on the electronic publication of my article. The cost of accessing this article is US$30 otherwise UCT has to pay(subscribe) to read its own output – are we being short changed?’ The Springer announcement reads: We are very pleased to be the first to congratulate you on the electronic publication of your article “Influence of Individual Learning Styles in Online Interaction: a Case for Dynamic Frequently Asked Questions (DFAQ)” published in “IFIP International Federation for Information Processing”. If your institution has access to this journal, you may view your paper at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34731-8_14
(you may need to copy and paste the URL into your browser). Well, UCT does not have a subscription, so how do Dick and his colleagues get to read his article, short of paying $30 a view (the price of a thick hardback book in this part of the world, or around 15 hamburgers on the ‘hamburger index’)?

There are in fact some practical things that academic authors can do to ensure that they have maximum access to their own publications. The most important would be to publish for preference in an Open Access journal if there is one in your field.
(And yes, they ARE peer-reviewed and there are high quality publications among the 2,000-odd OA journals, as well as one OA author who has recently won a Nobel Prize.) Next, it is advantageous to secure the right to archive a preprint or postprint of an article on your personal or institutional website. A preprint is the article in the form submitted to the journal, before peer reviewing. A postprint is the article revised according to peer reviewers’ recommendations, but without the journal’s editing and typesetting.) What is clear from research conducted on the impact of archiving, is that the availability of a pre-or postprint increases the downloads of the journal article and can have a significant effect on the citation levels of your work. It also means that yourarticle can be made available to your colleagues, or more generally, depending on the policy of the publisher.

What local authors do not all seem to know is that most journal publishers – some 90% of them – including the major ones, do allow this practice. In Dick’s case, Springer allows for both pre-and postprint archiving.

So how do you handle this if you are submitting or publishing an article? To check the policy of the journal you are thinking of publishing with, go the the Sherpa/Romeo website, where you can search on journals and publishers to establish their policies. The next step is to use one of the toolkits available through the Science Commons Rio Framework on Open Science (blogged in an earlier blog), which includes links to the Copyright Toolbox produced through a joint UK/Netherlands university collaboration. Then negotiate a contract with as much access as you can, using the sample clauses set out in the toolkits, which
by now must be pretty familiar to the journal publishers, seeing that they were created by major university bodies. These include retaining copyright (if you can get away with it) or at least being able to archive your article in some form and being allowed to use your own article in teaching and further research.

The really important thing, though, is that we need to lobby for policies in South Africa for the creation and mandating of research repositories in our universities. This is vital, given the increased access to and impact for our research that this could achieve. But more about that in another blog….

iCommons spins off tools for Open Access scholarship – the Rio Framework for Open Science

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The iCommons Summit in Rio (June 2006) continues to spin off results. It is great to see that the promises made by various groups at the Summit – in this case the Science Commons – are delivering on schedule. An invaluable set of resources for Open Access scholarship was launched this week, the Rio Framework for Open Science. The resources are set up on a wiki, moderated by John Willbanks (who will be visiting South Africa in February) and our own Heather Ford, who heads up Creative Commons South Africa and is also Executive Director of iCommons.

The Rio Declaration says this about its purpose:

The goal of this Framework is to provide a seedbed of resources for those interested in Open Science, from the background information to examples of institutional policy, from arguments and evidence to the tools needed to implement various elements of Open Science.

The website collates information and resources that could, as the website puts it, ‘unleash the scientific research cycle’. I must confess I brought proceedings to a grinding halt at the iCommons when I asked “Whadd’ya mean by ‘Science’?” The answer appears to be that the main drive for the Science Commons comes from people with an S&T background (it is housed at MIT), yet the tools it is developing could be of value to scholars in all disciplines.

The main headings under which resources are collected are:

  • Policy – listings and links to the various OA policy declarations and initiatives and articles and case studies on OA, how it works and its impact factors. There are signs that South Africa is beginning to grapple with the question of access to research from public funding and the recent ASSAf Report on scholarly publishing in South Africa is recommending Open Access repositories and journals. So OA policy is on our agenda right now.
  • Law – not only Creative Commons copyright contracts, but invaluable stuff from the Scholar’s Copyright Project, such as the ‘Author’s Addenda’ that can be added to publication contracts to ensure that academics can retain at least enough rights to be able to archive their articles on the Internet.
  • Technology – useful links to OS software tools for research management – for archiving, creating documents, annotating on the web…

There is a lot here – go and take a look and add to the Wiki with our own resources.