From: <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:31:05 +0000

Dear Bill,

I think the quote from Steve Goodman - Editor of a non-open access
journal, Clinical Trials - and the placement of the quote early in the
article make the erroneous connection between the dubious marketing of
a scientific conference and open access publishing.

The internet and digital marketing enabled the conference described in
the article to be promoted in the way that it was, and the internet
enabled open access publishing. But as I see it that's as far as the
connection goes. We see dubious online marketing of many products and
services because of the low start-up costs and low technological
knowledge now needed to do such things, because of the power of the
internet. But suggesting that open access is to blame for the dubious
conference is like trying to blame open access for digital music
piracy - another unwanted, but mostly unrelated, product of digital
information sharing online.

I was discussing this article on twitter last week, and a follower put
it down to "lazy journalism":

https://twitter.com/iainh_z/status/321224528015527936

Best regards,

Iain

Iain Hrynaszkiewicz
Outreach Director
FACULTY of 1000
http://f1000.com
Email: [log in to unmask]
Faculty of 1000, Middlesex House, 34-42 Cleveland St
London W1T 4LB, UK


-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Cohen <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:24:46 -0400

Heather,

Beall attempts makes a distinction between high quality open access
scholarship vs. (in his opinion) open access scams and scoundrels.

Are there not both?

The quote is provided by Eisen, "But suggesting, as the article does,
that scam conferences/journals exist because of the rise of open
access publishing is ridiculous."

I didn't read that anywhere in the New York Times article.

Scam conferences/journal exist because of the rise of some predatory
open access publishers--greedy, unscrupulous, sometimes vapid
individuals, the bad apples--not open access publishing in general as
a growing and wonderful movement.

Bill


On 4/11/13 7:09 PM, LIBLICENSE wrote:

From: Heather Morrison <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:48:46 -0700

With open access policy under discussion in the US and the UK, this
might be a good time to ask whether something like the "media
messaging" recommended by the "pit bull of public relations" to
representatives of Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society
in 2006 is underfoot.

As reported by Jim Giles in Nature:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v445/n7126/full/445347a.html

Some of Dezenhall's advice:

"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 latter suggests the kind of strategy behind the NYT article -
paint the open access world as equated with low quality. I wonder if
anyone at the NYT would be interested in doing some digging to find
out where the ideas for this article came from? This might make for an
interesting investigation!

Note that the article brings up a very real problem - pseudo
conferences and predatory journals - but falsely equates this with
open access publishing. As Michael Eisen commented on his blogpost,
connecting these operations with PLoS is like blaming NYT for people
who sell fake newspapers door to door.
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1354

best,

Heather Morrison