Elsevier & H.R. 801
First, i’ve been interested in open access for a long time, and still remember the feeling i had as a graduate student when i walked through the publication process with my advisor. “First we pay to be published, then we pay for reprints, then our library pays for a subscription?”
At JCDL2007 John Willinsky gave a great keynote about The Public Knowledge Project, right before he went off to join the faculty at Stanford. It’s hard for me to imagine that Willinsky and Larry Lessig didn’t spend time talking to each other during the years they were both there. I find it not surprising that, as Lessig left Stanford to go to Harvard to be faculty director of Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, he promptly engaged with Representative Conyers over H.R. 801, the “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act.” Utterly misnamed in my opinion, this would “would prohibit federal entities from requiring anyone who conducts government-funded research to place a copy of the resulting work in the public domain.”[1,2]
Now Deborah Kaplan has summarized neatly the duplicitous practice of Elsevier in producing fake Journals to help big pharma’s marketing, and then she connects that to the reason H.R. 801 is “needed:” Elsevier has been explaining how “open access research will be devastating because it will be impossible for anyone to tell what is high-quality research and what is solid, peer-reviewed, and published by a reputable gatekeeper.”
To use Lessig’s conclusion
Yet another reason to support citizen funded elections. Yet another reason to join the strike (”strike4change.com“) Change Congress has launched. Promise not to give money to any candidate who doesn’t support irrevocably citizen funded election. (Come on. You don’t want to give anyway.)
At the very minimum, ask Congressman Conyers to explain exactly why — if it wasn’t the money — he’s so keen to hurt science.
[1] http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/mirror-congress-lessig-vs-conyers
[2] Of possible interest is this article advising employers about works for hire.
Meanwhile, there’s the copyright conference to write up, stream keeping reports, and some comments before the special election on Tuesday. So it goes.
ETA, 2009-06-23: Elsevier returns to the news with a story about buying good reviews on Amazon for $25. An email to textbook contributors included the request
Now that the book is published, we need your help to get some 5 star reviews posted to both Amazon and Barnes & Noble to help support and promote it. As you know, these online reviews are extremely persuasive when customers are considering a purchase. For your time, we would like to compensate you with a copy of the book under review as well as a $25 Amazon gift card.
Elsevier officials, “eager to appear responsive,” said this was the work of an overzealous employee and clarified their policy:
Tom Reller, director of corporate relations for Elsevier, issued a statement distinguishing between what was and was not acceptable under company policy. “Encouraging interested parties to post book reviews isn’t outside the norm in scholarly publishing, nor is it wrong to offer to nominally compensate people for their time, some of these books are quite large,” he said. “But in all instances the request should be unbiased, with no incentives for a positive review, and that’s where this particular e-mail went too far.”
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Tags: behaving badly, change congress, elsevier, open access
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