From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2016 17:57:01 +0000

Recently I was contacted by Library Journal (LJ) in connection with a
series of video interviews it is conducting with open access “VIP’s
and leaders”. The first interview – with the Director of Harvard
University’s Office for Scholarly Communication Peter Suber – has
already been published. Would I have some time to do an interview
myself, I was asked? The project is for a new section of LJ’s web site
sponsored by the open access publisher Dove Press.

I liked the idea of doing a video interview but I was instinctively
shy of being associated with a project that has a large Dove Press
banner on the top right hand corner proclaiming it to be the
“exclusive sponsor” of the site, along with a list of featured
articles with “Sponsored by Dove Medical Press” in prominent red ink
strapped across the top of each one. I felt that taking part would
amount to endorsing Dove Press, which for reasons I explain in a blog
post I did not want to do.

I emailed LJ back to say I was not comfortable with doing an interview
for a site sponsored by Dove Press, and asked whether it would
consider posting any such video elsewhere on the LJ site. Strangely, I
received no reply to this. As I was now intrigued as to how this site
had come about, who had suggested the idea, and what its purpose was I
also emailed LJ’s Managing Editor. To this too I received no reply.

The blog post on this can be accessed here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/why-i-wont-be-doing-that-video.html

Some comments on my post by Peter Suber can be read here:

http://bit.ly/1Qu7LF4

A tweet to Library Journal inviting it to respond to the about
comments is available here:

https://twitter.com/RickyPo/status/702241648839958534


Richard Poynder