An anti-open access extremist claims he only opposes open access extremism. Let's look at the record.

In an Open Letter to the American Chemical Society my Scibling Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science, an ACS member, asked several pointed questions about how the Society was running its publications. One of the flagship publications is Chemical & Engineering News, whose editor in chief, Rudy Baum responded to her via email and she posted it, without comment, on her blog. That is right and proper. But I am under no constraint, so I will comment. If I were polite, I'd say Baum's response was disingenuous. But I'm not so polite, so I'll just say I don't believe him.

Specifically, Baum's response claims:

ACS has a clear and consistent policy on open access. The anonymous emails that have been circulated have made much of three editorials I have written that were critical of open access. I happen to think that the extreme open access model advocated by its most rabid proponents is very bad idea that will do substantial harm to the scientific enterprise, and I have written to that effect. I know you and some members of ACS disagree. However, I never asked anyone at ACS what they thought of my opinion on open access and I certainly did not coordinate my editorials with any activities of the society.

On the contrary, Baum's editorials are themselves rabid and extreme expressions of opposition to all forms of Open Access. Here is an example, obnoxiously entitled "Socialized Science":

National Institutes of Health director Elias A. Zerhouni seems hell-bent on imposing an "open access" model of publishing on researchers receiving NIH grants. His action will inflict long-term damage on the communication of scientific results and on maintenance of the archive of scientific knowledge.

More important, Zerhouni's action is the opening salvo in the open-access movement's unstated, but clearly evident, goal of placing responsibility for the entire scientific enterprise in the federal government's hand. Open access, in fact, equates with socialized science.

[snip;]

Many observers believe that, if the NIH policy takes effect, other funding agencies will quickly follow suit. In short order, all research supported by the federal government would be posted on government websites six months after publication. This is unlikely to satisfy open-access advocates, who will continue to push for immediate posting of the research.

[snip]

As I've written on this page in the past, one important consequence of electronic publishing is to shift primary responsibility for maintaining the archive of STM literature from libraries to publishers.

[snip]

Which is, I suspect, the outcome desired by open-access advocates. Their unspoken crusade is to socialize all aspects of science, putting the federal government in charge of funding science, communicating science, and maintaining the archive of scientific knowledge. If that sounds like a good idea to you, then NIH's open-access policy should suit you just fine.

Here's more, an editorial appropriately titled, "More Socialized Science":

As readers of this page are aware, I have almost no use at all for the open-access movement. Open access at its most extreme is a shell game, the unstated goal of which is to transfer responsibility for publishing and archiving the scientific literature from the private sector to the federal government.

Open access starts with the axiom that scientific information should be free. This axiom is taken by advocates as so obvious and so righteous that it needs no further explication. It is the raison d'être of the open- access movement.

[snip]

Open-access advocates also argue that, because the public paid for most of the research through grants from federal and state agencies, the public should not have to pay to access the results of the research. This is the shell game. Conducting research and publishing the results of research are two separate activities that both involve costs. Open access shifts the costs of publishing research results from the users of scientific information--in most cases, other researchers, not the general public--to the researchers conducting the research in the form of page and submission charges. Most chemists thought the abolition of page charges was a good idea.

[snip]

For all of their posturing about the public, open-access advocates are motivated by a deep antipathy toward the private sector and the firm belief that the federal government, not the private sector, should control scientific publishing. They are, in fact, advocating socialized science. In the more extreme open-access scenarios, such as ones now being developed by the National Library of Medicine, this goal is explicit and the federal government itself becomes the publisher and archivist of the scientific and technical literature. (Rudy Baum, Editorial in Chemical & Engineering News)

Here's another one, an editorial titled "The Open Access Myth":

Open access is predicated on an obvious truth and a dangerous myth. The obvious truth is that most of the research published in the STM literature is supported by public funding. Therefore, open-access advocates claim, the research should be freely available to the public that funds it.

At first blush, the argument seems reasonable. The dangerous, usually unspoken, myth that makes the argument seem reasonable is this: STM publishers add little value to the research they publish and therefore should not charge institutions for subscriptions to the electronic versions of their journals, or, at the very least, they should provide open access to the public a short time after publication.

[snip]

[Public Library of Science, an open access journal]'s business model is to charge a fee of $1,500 per paper to authors to cover the costs of publishing. Whether $1,500 per paper is a reasonable assessment of the cost of publishing a peer-reviewed research paper is open to question. And it's not clear to me what advantage is conferred by shifting the cost of publishing from libraries to researchers.

[snip]

It's human nature to want something for nothing. Unfortunately, excellence rarely comes without a price. Perhaps that's the most dangerous myth being fostered by the open-access movement: that access to high-quality STM literature can be had on the cheap.(Rudy Baum, editorial in Chemical & Engineering News)

Baum says different things in these editorials. One is that the aim of "socialized science" is to shift the responsibilities of archiving to publishers, another is that it is to move the responsibility of publishing and archiving to the federal government (contradicting his first point), another that open access is motivated by hostility to the private sector, and the last, perhaps the only honest one, that open access is another private sector business model for science publishing that competes with the business model ACS uses and puts ACS at a competitive disadvantage.

Baum is not opposed to "extreme" forms of rabid open access. He is opposed to all open access, although he deliberately mischaracterizes it in ways that all open access appears extreme. Baum acknowledges that the open access policy is the policy of the ACS and its Board of Directors, elected by the membership.

Now that the membership sees how the Board and management represent their views, maybe they will decide to replace them. We can hope.

Full disclosure: I'll state again that I am coeditor-in-chief of an open access, peer reviewed scientific journal, published by a private publisher. My opinions on open access are not a result of that connection. On the contrary, the completely uncompensated time I devote to being an editor is a consequence of my opinions about open access. I am not opposed to subscription supported journals. They have an important role to play. They support science journalists and provide added value in news and comment sections not usually found in open access journals. But I find Baum's editorials intellectually dishonest and the machinations of the ACS in trying to defeat an important development in science publishing reprehensible. It is jackboot science that reflects badly on the ACS.

Time for current management to go.