Jim Giles, who broke the story of how for-profit publishers had hired Eric Dezenhall to run a PR campaign against Open Access, has a post at the New Scientist Science News blog, where he posts a copy of Dezenhall's proposal. It always nice to see more of the inner workings of the astroturf industry:
4 Enlist Think Tank Support
Seek studies, white papers and public commentary from think tanks that may quantify the risks, the societal price tag of public access. Groups that may be considered include the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings, Cato, Competitive Enterpise Institute and National Consumers League.
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When three separate people send you an article in Nature it gets your attention. Since I have a paid subscription to Nature, my attention was ready to be grabbed anyway, but I hadn't yet read this story so a tip of the hat to my informants. I also have paid personal subscriptions to Science and a…
revere reports
The for-profit publishers don't like BMC or Public Library of Science (PLoS) or any of the other open access publishers and are determined to crush them. So they hired the PR firm of Eric Dezenhall, who also worked for convicted Enron execs and others of that ilk, to do "media…
First the former Enron chief Jeffrey Skilling hired him, then ExxonMobil, now ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS?
This ain't good.
From Nature News:
The consultant advised [Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society] to focus on simple messages, such as "Public access equals government censorship". He…
Over the weekend I spotlighted a Washington Post article on the Association of American Publishers' hiring of the "PR Pit Bull" to frame their attacks on free access to federally-financed research articles. The Post article noted the perception problems caused by consulting with Eric Dezenhall,…
When I was retyping that memo so people wouldn't have to deal with a PDF, I got to that list of "think tanks" and couldn't help but laugh out loud.
It's always good to see the chsampions of "Freedom" fighting against freedom.
"the societal price tag of public access."
What about the massive 'societal price tag' of restricting public access to the science (which, on the whole, the public paid for in the first place via government grants)?
What a mercenary hypocrite.
The public paid for the science to be done (for the most part) but if you want public access you also have to pay for the publication (electronic and print) and maintenance of the records. That will be a significant and on-going cost to the budgets of a lot of countries. What is more, there will then be a policy risk. What if NIH, for example, decides that PubMedE-Journals are not an important part of their mission anymore?