Science Journal Publishers Wary of Free Information

Billosaur writes "Nature.com is reporting that the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which includes the companies that publish scientific journals, is becoming concerned with the free-information movement. A meeting was arranged with PR professional Eric Dezenhall to discuss the problem. Dezenhall's firm has worked with the likes of ExxonMobil 'to criticize the environmental group Greenpeace', among other campaigns. The publishers are worried that the free exchange of scientific information may be bad for the bottom line, as it might cause the money from subscriptions to their journals to dry up. Among the recommendations: '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, and "paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles.' The AAP is trying to counter messages from groups such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS), an open-access publisher and prominent advocate of free access to information, or the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) PubMed Central."

Comments

I'm lost.

[grub]

"Public access equals government censorship"

I've been parsing that for a few minutes and it doesn't make sense. How would open access equate to some sort of closed access?

Re:Can anyone point out

[bzipitidoo]

The whole of scientific publishing is a big racket. If you stay away from dead trees, publishing a journal is shockingly inexpensive. Peer review is customarily done for free. When journals are printed up, they are sold at prices that almost guarantee a fat profit for the printer and publisher. If ever you pony up $10 or whatever ludicrous price a publisher asks for some 10 page journal article, know that the authors get precisely 0% of that money. As if that isn't bad enough, organizers hold a conference somewhere like at a ski resort which gives them a cut rate but socks it to the attendees, among whom are pretty much all the authors whose work was accepted. The attendees can almost always pass those costs on their patrons, but for those who don't have such support....

Authors get very little. All the authors get directly is bragging rights. The indirect compensation, only given out to "the best", is of course the tenured university teaching and research position, which is also the gateway to grant money. Sucks for researchers who haven't managed to get into that system. Also sucks for those researchers whom their patron (usually the government) cuts, especially when it's not for good reasons like their research is of poor quality but for political reasons. Someone even suggested that authors should _pay_ to have their work published! Well, scientists who aren't backed by a patron do have to pay. The RIAA cries about starving artists, but starving scientists, especially if their work is not what grant givers want to hear or believe, get treatment as bad or worse as the worst ever dished out to artists.

You bet

[PopeRatzo]

The point here is that there are money-grubbing scientists. It's not just the Republicans any more.

I'm telling you, the quicker the entire Intellectual Property system goes topsy-turvy, the better. There was a watershed moment, sometime in the last few decades, when copyright, patents, the whole schmear, started working against it's initial purpose - to encourage innovation and creativity. Now, you write a good song and you hope it gets used in a movie and a commercial and you're set for life. How does that make you more creative?

I made my living from the IP system until some years ago, when I noticed the first time I lost revenue because of the copying and sharing of my work without my permission. After an initial few hours of outrage, the part of me that got into this whole business to be creative started to realize "Of COURSE people want to share it and copy it. It's entire value is in it's dissemination. It's what's SUPPOSED to happen."

Then, I went to work to reevaluate how I charged for my ideas and to come up with a way that's not based on commoditizing or objectifying my creativity, but just the opposite: Embracing the fact that these things are ephemeral. They are MEANT to be shared, copied, live a life and then go into an archive, maybe to be found again and maybe not. I don't need to collect a toll every time someone uses what I make, and I don't need to squeeze every last cent.

The final piece of the puzzle for me is figuring out a way to identify my work as my own, not to prevent copying, but to prevent someone else saying they made it. Unless that's part of the deal, that is. Digital Watermarking is still too expensive for a small-market individual like me and there are still some questions about signatures. I read an article about how The Aphex Twin hid his own face in a graphical display of his music. That fascinated me and I'm always bugging the math folk in my little world about these things. An answer will come. I just hope it's Open Source, or at least reasonable.

Reasonableness. I guess that's the solution, no?