In this blog, I've emphasised the parallels between open source and open access. We know that as Microsoft has become more and more threatened by the former, it has resorted to more and more desperate attempts to sow FUD. Now comes this tremendous story from Nature that the traditional scientific publishing houses are contemplating doing the same to attack open access:
Nature has learned, a group of big scientific publishers has hired the pit bull to take on the free-information movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available. Some traditional journals, which depend on subscription charges, say that open-access journals and public databases of scientific papers such as the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) PubMed Central, threaten their livelihoods.
The "pit bull" is Eric Dezenhall:
his firm, Dezenhall Resources, was also reported by Business Week to have used money from oil giant ExxonMobil to criticize the environmental group Greenpeace.
These are some of the tactics being considered:
Dezenhall also recommended joining forces with groups that may be ideologically opposed to government-mandated projects such as PubMed Central, including organizations that have angered scientists. One suggestion was the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Washington DC, which has used oil-industry money to promote sceptical views on climate change. Dezenhall estimated his fee for the campaign at $300,000–500,000.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, you may recall, are the people behind the risible "Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution, we call it life" campaign of misinformation about global warming.
This is a clear sign that we're in the end-game for open access's victory.
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