AAP ‘disinformation campaign’ attacked by Open Access backer

“There is a concerted disinformation campaign now underway on the part of some (but not all) members of the AAP [Association of American Publishers], faithfully following the high-priced pit-bull script the AAP purchased from corporate trouble-shooter Eric Dezenhall.” Said Open Access (OA) proponent; Stevan Harnard, Canada Research Chair, Institute of Cognitive Sciences at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal.

Harnard, described sometimes as an ‘archivangelist’ and at the forefront of the OA movement made his recent statement in the wake of the AAP releasing their anti-OA forum, The Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM).

Backers of PRISM and fellow anti-Open Access lobbyists argue that OA is a threat to the peer-review process. Last week, Dr. Brian Crawford, chairman of the executive council of AAP’s Professional & Scholarly Publishing Division said, “Peer review has been the global standard for validating scholarly research for more than 400 years and we want to make sure it remains free of unnecessary government interference, agenda-driven research and bad science.”

Harnard said that the AAP and anti-OA lobby are “actually worrying about the loss of their subscription revenues, not the loss of peer review” he went on to say “This is not about peer review at all, but about an industry trying to resist adapting to technological developments in the online era merely in order to maximise its own interests, at the expense of the public interest.”

In the detailed four-point rebuttal of the AAP’s recent lobbying against the OA, Harnard stated; “peer-reviewed journal-article authors give journals their articles for free: no royalties,” even though the authors works are government funded through grants or through salaries from their employers, who are mostly universities. Secondly, “peers review for free” donating both time and expertise in order to maintain quality in the peer review process and its fair management. Harnard’s third argument claims that “Publisher revenues from institutional subscriptions are currently paying the full cost of managing the peer review, several times over” the subscriptions being sold “mostly to the author’s institutions”.

Harnard’s final point addresses the long term future of the peer review and subscriptions, he suggests; “if institutional subscriptions are ever cancelled, peer review management costs will be paid out of the institutional subscription cancellation savings”.

By making these savings the OA publishing model can afford funding. That money can then be diverted to a network of institutional OA repositories to make research papers available there rather than through publisher-led subscriptions.

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