A number of people in the Open Access movement are up in arms because a large publishing group just hired Eric Dezenhall, a man known as "the pit bull of PR," to tackle the "threat" posed by OA.
One might wonder how a nominally talented PR agent would end with such a horrible reputation. Additionally, since Dezenhall hasn’t actually done anything for the publishers yet, one might conclude that the act of hiring "the pit bull of PR" might have been a bad PR move in and of itself.
See also the public health blog Effect Measure’s take at http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2007/01/my_advice_to_the_american_chem.php
I thought you and your readers might be interested in the upcoming “National Day of Action” for students that support open sharing of scientific and scholarly research on the internet.
Freeculture.org and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access are organizing this day of action, planned for Feb. 15 (announced Feb. 1.)
More information is at:
http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/media/Release07-0201.html
Ellen Duranceau
Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant,
MIT Libraries
It looks like the group behind the PRISM Coalition is actually the American Chemical Society. Certainly, some of the top leaders at ACS, such as Brian Crawford are involved. And Madeleine Jacobs has never been a friend of Open Access.
Interesting! Thanks Dave!