Greg Dahlmann, who is rapidly becoming Captain Insightful and Visionary in Chief around AMBI as we create the Borg Cube of Bioethics Blogdom (boy would he hate it if he saw this post), alerted me to this hillarious/horrifying post on Poynteronline about the response of major science journals to the “open access” movement. PR guy extraordinaire Eric Dezenhall helped out a lot with some great arguments, if what you mean by great arguments is “sounds like a Republican presidential campaign piece”:

Nature said that Dezenhall advised the science publishers 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, and ‘paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles.'”

Dezenhall also recommended joining forces with unlikely allies such as the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute — which, in addition to being a vocal critic of mainstream climate change science, reportedly opposes government-mandated science information projects such as PubMed Central.

Labels: ethics of publication, no such thing as a free lunch