Plausible Accuracy

Several recent links from Open Access News have reminded me once again of how strong the resistance to OA can be from publishers.

I’m a (5 yr +) member of the American Chemical Society, an organization which publishes several of the prominent journals in the field.  I have to admit that I hold the membership with a certain distaste.

Rudy Baum, the editor-in-chief of the weekly Chemical and Engineering News has long held anti-OA positions supported by arguments rife with Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD), as well as a fair does of self-delusion.  An example of just how confused Baum is about OA come from a 2004 editorial:

access to the STM literature is more open today than it ever has been: Anyone can do a search of the literature and obtain papers that interest them, so long as they are willing to pay a reasonable fee for access to the material.

Leaving aside the debate of what a “reasonable fee” might be, this quote shows that Baum has a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between “accessible” and “open”. A front-row seat at the Metropolitan Opera is accessible for a “reasonable fee”, but I doubt people would consider it open to the general public.

OAN linked to a piece in Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship which delves further into ACS’s “war on OA”.  The icing on the ACS cake, however, is this bullshit-ridden interview with the president of ACS publications.  I wanted to excerpt the parts of the OA discussion that were crap and pick them apart one-by-one, but I realized I was going to be talking about almost every sentence.  So here you go (my comments in bold):

What are your views on open access?

We are in favour of various access models [as long as we get paid] and think authors should have the right to choose. We don’t think that governments or others should mandate what authors do and require them to pay [Except us, of course - we can mandate what authors do and require them to pay]  Note that this is a textbook FUD argument of “OA means you, the hardworking scientist, will have to pay more” which has been refuted time and time again.

Immediately on publication each of our authors is given a link that they can put on their websites or funding body’s site free of charge. How nice, I can link to my own work for free! There is a limit of 50 downloads of their paper in the first year.  50 downloads might last a few weeks tops, even for a moderately popular article.

If the author wants to place the whole article on their website or funding body’s site then we have our ‘AuthorChoice’ model where authors pay [terribly exorbinant fees] to make their articles open access [and ACS still keeps the copyright, it's win-win, really]. Most of our revenue comes from subscriptions, with a bit [ok, a lot] from advertising. We don’t see many authors choosing the AuthorChoice option [because we don't explain it whatsoever in our publication guides]. We’ve had this model out for about a year and less than one per cent of papers are published this way (ibid). Not all authors have access to funds that they could use to pay to publish (Then how do they afford your page charges?  Note: another attempt at the OA = author payment crap) and most of our authors are pleased with the access that others have to their papers anyway [because many of them aren't aware of other options and don't have contact with people at non-R1 research institutions].

We enable authors to submit their raw data too [The more of their intellectual work we can own the better of course]. We put this outside our firewall [but not outside of our copyright] so it is open to non-subscribers too but we do not tag this information.

We left the matter of putting preprints in repositories to editorial discretion on the individual journals and the editors have chosen not to allow this [on pain of death/firing]. After publication there is the option to have the free author directed link or to pay for open access. The society feels it is better to have the published version available.  I don’t know what these last two sentences mean, but I get the feeling it’s another rehash of the OA = $$$ deal.

So, that was enlightening I hope.  All in all, this paints a picture of the ACS as a top-to-bottom nemesis of OA and all that it stands for.  I would argue that perhaps its members are not as happy with the organization’s efforts to retain an iron-clad grip on the fruits of research as the ACS might think.  Every time the membership renewal notice comes around, I pause a minute before sending in my check.  Perhaps next time that pause will be more permanent.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 1:11 pm and is filed under copyright, open science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.