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

Re:Peer review means little.

[markov_chain]

I haven't been in the academia for a couple of decades yet, but in my experience:
- peer reviewed papers are typically far better than nonreviewed (both production and content)
- among the peer reviewed papers there is again a tiering of quality; some conferences/journals have higher standards.

That said, there still happen cases where bad/incosequential papers get accepted, and good ones rejected, but I found that this kind of thing can automatically correct itself through the citation process; nobody will cite the bad papers, and sometimes people will start citing the good ones even if they are not published in a peer-reviewed forum, but still available on the author's web page, or as a technical report at some university.