Opposition to Open Access: alert to misinformation

Here is an excerpt from last week's Nature, Jim Giles' article PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access, courtesy of Open Access News:

The author of Nail 'Em! Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses is not the kind of figure normally associated with the relatively sedate world of scientific publishing. Besides writing the odd novel, Eric Dezenhall has made a name for himself helping companies and celebrities protect their reputations, working for example with Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron chief now serving a 24-year jail term for fraud.

Although Dezenhall declines to comment on Skilling and his other clients, his firm, Dezenhall Resources, was also reported by Business Week to have used money from oil giant ExxonMobil to criticize the environmental group Greenpeace. "He's the pit bull of public relations," says Kevin McCauley, an editor at the magazine O'Dwyer's PR Report.

Now, 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.

From e-mails passed to Nature, it seems Dezenhall spoke to employees from Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society at a meeting arranged last July by the Association of American Publishers (AAP)....

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....

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.

In an enthusiastic e-mail sent to colleagues after the meeting, Susan Spilka, Wiley's director of corporate communications, said Dezenhall explained that publishers had acted too defensively on the free-information issue and worried too much about making precise statements. Dezenhall noted that if the other side is on the defensive, it doesn't matter if they can discredit your statements, she added: "Media massaging is not the same as intellectual debate.

Comment

Subsequent articles have appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Washington Post, and Scientific American, and a number of bloggers, myself included, have commented. The best place to follow the discussion is Open Access News.

Today's Open Access News reports a letter from the American Association of Publishers' / Scholarly Publishing Division, responding to which shows that they either don't get it, or don't care. In this letter, AAP/SPS claims that publishers "manage and fund the peer review proces". Manage, yes. Fund? Get real...peer reviewers are not paid, and profitable publishers do not fund the publishing process, they are funded by it.

AAP - if you'd like to shake a reputation for deliberate misinformation - trying to pretend you are funding something you are actually deriving profits from, is not the best approach.

The American Chemical Society is one of the members of this association.

Educational Gaming

Bego,
Here is the information on the EduFrag project (using Unreal Tournament) you requested today at the conference call:
Wiki
Paper
Blog

Here is an example of how it is used as a race in class.

I would be willing to help in putting together a maze on a topic relevant to CWB.

Jean-Claude

ExxonMobil's inconvenient truth

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/editorial/16154788.htm Posted on Sun, Dec. 03, 2006 ExxonMobil's inconvenient truth By Laurie David At hundreds of screenings this year of ``An Inconvenient Truth,'' the first thing many viewers said after the lights came up was that every student in every school in the United States needed to see this movie. The producers of former Vice President Al Gore's film about global warming, myself included, certainly agreed. So the company that made the documentary decided to offer 50,000 free DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) for educators to use in their classrooms. It seemed like a no-brainer. The teachers had a different idea: Thanks but no thanks, they said. In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that other ``special interests'' might ask to distribute materials, too; they said they didn't want to offer ``political'' endorsement of the film; and they saw ``little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its members'' in accepting the free DVDs. Gore, however, is not running for office, and the film's theatrical run is long since over. As for classroom benefits, the movie has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading climate scientists worldwide, and is required viewing for all students in Norway and Sweden. Still, maybe the NSTA is just being extra cautious. But there was one more curious argument in the e-mail: Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place ``unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters.'' One of those supporters, it turns out, is the ExxonMobil Corp. That's the same ExxonMobil that for more than a decade has done everything possible to muddle public understanding of global warming and stifle any serious effort to solve it. It has run ads in leading newspapers questioning the role of human-made emissions in global warming, and financed the work of a small band of scientific skeptics who have tried to challenge the consensus that heat-trapping pollution is drastically altering our atmosphere. The company spends millions to support groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute that aggressively pressure lawmakers to oppose emission limits. It's bad enough when a company tries to sell junk science to a bunch of grown-ups. But, like a tobacco company using cartoons to peddle cigarettes, ExxonMobil is going after our kids, too. And it has been doing so for longer than you may think. NSTA says it has received $6 million from the company since 1996, mostly for the association's ``Building a Presence for Science'' program, an electronic networking initiative intended to ``bring standards-based teaching and learning'' into schools, according to the NSTA Web site. ExxonMobil has a representative on the group's corporate advisory board. And in 2003, NSTA gave the company an award for its commitment to science education. So much for special interests and implicit endorsements. In the past year alone, according to its Web site, ExxonMobil's foundation gave $42 million to key organizations that influence the way children learn about science, from kindergarten until they graduate from high school. And ExxonMobil isn't the only one getting in on the action. The oil industry, the coal industry and other corporate interests are exploiting shortfalls in education funding by using a small slice of their record profits to buy themselves a classroom soapbox, through textbooks, classroom posters and teacher seminars. NSTA's list of corporate donors also includes Shell Oil and the American Petroleum Institute (API), which funds NSTA's Web site on the science of energy. There, students can find a section called ``Running on Oil'' and read a page that touts the industry's environmental track record -- citing improvements mostly attributable to laws that the companies have fought tooth and nail, by the way -- but makes only vague references to spills or pollution. NSTA has distributed a video produced by API called ``You Can't Be Cool Without Fuel,'' a shameless pitch for oil dependence. The education organization also hosts an annual convention, described on ExxonMobil's Web site as featuring ``more than 450 companies and organizations displaying the most current textbooks, lab equipment, computer hardware and software, and teaching enhancements.'' The company ``regularly displays'' its ``many . . . education materials'' at the exhibition. John Borowski, a science teacher at North Salem High School in Salem, Ore., was dismayed by NSTA's partnerships with industrial polluters when he attended the association's annual convention this year and witnessed hundreds of teachers and school administrators walk away with armloads of free corporate lesson plans. Along with propaganda challenging global warming from ExxonMobil, the curricular offerings included lessons on forestry provided by Weyerhaeuser and International Paper, Borowski says, and the benefits of genetic engineering courtesy of biotech giant Monsanto. ``The materials from the American Petroleum Institute and the other corporate interests are the worst form of a lie: omission,'' Borowski says. ``The oil and coal guys won't address global warming, and the timber industry papers over clear-cuts.'' An API memo leaked to the media as long ago as 1998 succinctly explains why the association is angling to infiltrate the classroom: ``Informing teachers/students about uncertainties in climate science will begin to erect barriers against further efforts to impose Kyoto-like measures in the future.'' So, how is any of this different from showing Gore's movie in the classroom? The answer is that neither Gore nor Participant Productions, which made the movie, stands to profit a nickel from giving away DVDs, and we aren't facing millions of dollars in lost business from limits on global-warming pollution and a shift to cleaner, renewable energy. It's hard to say whether NSTA is a bad guy here or just a sorry victim of tight education budgets. And we don't pretend that a two-hour movie is a substitute for a rigorous science curriculum. Students should expect, and parents should demand, that educators present an honest and unbiased look at the true state of knowledge about the challenges of the day. As for ExxonMobil -- which just began a fuzzy advertising campaign that trumpets clean energy and low emissions -- this story shows that slapping green stripes on a corporate tiger doesn't change the beast within. The company is still playing the same cynical game it has for years. While NSTA and ExxonMobil ponder the moral lesson they're teaching with all this, 50,000 DVDs are sitting in a Los Angeles warehouse, waiting to be distributed. In the meantime, Mom and Dad may want to keep a sharp eye on their kids' science homework. LAURIE DAVID, a producer of ``An Inconvenient Truth,'' is a Natural Resources Defense Council trustee and founder of StopGlobalWarming.org. She wrote this article for the Washington Post.

© 2006 MercuryNews.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.mercurynews.com