The battle over public access to scientific literature stretches back to the late 1990s when Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus began plans for PubMed Central--a repository for all research resulting from National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding--and, a few years later, launched the Public Library of Science (PLoS). These easily accessible journals and repositories have struck fear into the hearts of traditional publishers, who have enlisted the "pit bull" of public relations to fight back, reports news@nature.
The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers hired Eric Dezenhall, head of Dezenhall Resources, a PR firm that specializes in "high stakes communications and marketplace defense," to address some of its members this past summer and potentially craft a media strategy. Dezenhall declined to comment for this article, citing "our longstanding policy due to strict confidentiality agreements neither to identify our clients nor comment on the work we do for them," in an email response to a request for an interview. But "nobody disagrees on the goals of high-stakes communications--sell a controversial product, win an election, defuse conflict and so forth," Dezenhall notes in the "manifesto" on the firm's website. "The life-or-death public relations struggles facing businesses today are not about information they are about power." In this case, the struggle is over access to scientific information.
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