Publishers Continue to Fight Open Access to Science | The Curious Cat Science and Engineering blog explores: innovation, technology, research, education, economics, gadgets, health care and scientific inquiry.

Publishers prepare for war over open access

On one side are the advocates of open-access journals – publications that make academic papers freely available and recoup costs by charging authors to publish. The model seems increasingly successful. New open-access journals are springing up weekly and could gain support if the US acts on plans make all its publicly funded health research freely available via a government archive.

Lined up against them are the academic publishers. The idea of open-access journals is frightening for an industry whose profits are based on subscription charges.
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Dezenhall’s strategy includes linking open access with government censorship and junk science – ideas that to me seem quite bizarre and misleading. Last month, however, the AAP launched a lobby group called the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine (PRISM), which uses many of the arguments that Dezenhall suggested.

It is sad to see journals that were founded to promote science so flawed in their thinking today. As I said last month in Science Journal Publishers Stay Stupid: “It is time for the scientific community to give up on these journals and start looking to move to work with new organizations that will encourage scientific communication and advancement (PLoS – arXiv.org – Open Access Engineering Journals) and leave those that seek to keep outdated practices to go out of business.” Organizations can’t ignore principles when choosing tactics. Tactics that might be ok in other situations, should not be acceptable to scientists publishing scientific information. When journals move to harm science to preserve their outdated business practices they deserve to lose the respect of scientists.

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