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