The politicization of the scientific publishing process
February 25, 2012 Filed under Blog, Featured, Publishing
Photo by Pat Ossa, Photo by capturedmoment1 via Flickr. Creative Commons license.
On one topic, Congress seemed to be moving in the right direction. Over the past few years, emphasis was placed on making the research that taxpayers funded open access—in other words, free for all to view.
According to a recent article by Wired, a bill called the Research Works Act introduced by Reps Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Darrell Issa (R-CA) would end that. The bill is backed by the Association of American Publishers, and Elsevier (one of the largest scientific publishing houses in the world, who publish over 2000 journals) has made 31 contributions to the House, with 12 going to Maloney herself.
Lessons from this:
1. Big publishing is just another special interest group.
2. Big publishing is powerful enough to buy members of Congress.
3. In doing so, the public loses because they already paid for the research.
Have you seen the recent movement to pressure Elsevier by publicly boycotting them? It started about a month ago in the mathematical community with Tim Gowers posting this – http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/ – and it’s led to thecostofknowledge.com where 7000 researchers (so far) have pledged some sort of boycott.
Man, talk about slamming a book, or a irwter in this case. I’ll be brutally honest, I snickered after reading part of the review, but I also felt horrible for the author because I sure wouldn’t want to be in her shoes if she came across it (if she hasn’t already). It’s one thing to write’ a bad review and give your opinion. However, it’s an entirely different story when the review is meant to blatently insult the author.I’ve heard about Publish America and needless to say, once I get to the point where I’ll need a publisher, they won’t be on my list.