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August 29, 2007

Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

Posted by John Baez

Ever hear about PRISM? It’s a publisher’s group — backed by Elsevier and others — that’s leading the fight against open access to scholarly publications.

To plan their strategy, PRISM hired none other than Eric Dezenhall:

This is the guy who BusinessWeek called the “pit bull of PR”. The guy whose firm Bill Moyers called “the Mafia of industry”. The guy who wrote:

Damage control used to be about soft, fuzzy concepts like image. Now it’s about survival, and this has made the battle bloodier.

And, guess what he advised the publishers to do!

According to a January article in Nature:

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). A follow-up message in which Dezenhall suggests a strategy for the publishers provides some insight into the approach they are considering taking.

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, and “paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles”.

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 messaging is not the same as intellectual debate”.

However, Dezenhall conceded that “it’s hard to fight an adversary that manages to be both elusive and in possession of a better message: Free information.”

Posted at August 29, 2007 12:07 PM UTC

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31 Comments & 2 Trackbacks

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

I like the Dr. Evil-style picture.

Posted by: Blake Stacey on August 29, 2007 2:54 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

Hey, I see what you mean! I hadn’t noticed the resemblance!


Posted by: John Baez on August 29, 2007 2:59 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

This has got to be the funniest thing ever posted at the n-category café.

Posted by: Bruce Bartlett on August 29, 2007 3:31 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

You can see who we’re up against…

Posted by: John Baez on August 29, 2007 3:34 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

NYTimes on Bush as Dr.Evil; Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

President Bush Profiled: Big Ideas, Tiny Details [New York Times, Wed 5 Sep 2007, p.B10, reviewing Robert Draper biography of Bush]:

“Apparently Mr.Bush loves doing imitations of Dr. Evil from the ‘Austin Powers’ movies.”

Dezenhall, Bush, Dr.Evil… connect the dots. Does that diagram commute?

Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post on September 6, 2007 5:50 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

I have to agree with this!!:D The plot thickens…

Posted by: beans on August 30, 2007 2:08 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

More aptly - the thick’uns plot

Posted by: Yontan on January 27, 2012 4:16 PM | Permalink | Reply to this
Read the post Evil Is His One and Only Name
Weblog: Science After Sunclipse
Excerpt: By now, you’ve probably heard of PRISM, the organization of publisher bigwigs fighting against open access. John Baez has just made a shocking discovery. Take a look at the brains of their outfit, Eric Dezenhall: It’s Dr. Evil! Well, wha...
Tracked: August 29, 2007 5:06 PM

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

I think it’s more frightening than funny.

As a young mathematician starting my research, I have to say I’m very happy people have taken the initiative to start the eurekajournalwatch so I can choose carefully where to submit papers in the future.

Posted by: Grétar Amazeen on August 29, 2007 7:58 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

Indeed it’s more frightening than funny — except for the fact that Dezenhall is secretly Dr. Evil. Reconstructive plastic surgery can work wonders, but he still needs to get those tell-tale nervous tics under control! That’s funny.

On the other hand, it’s frightening to read what BusinessWeek says about Dezenhall’s role in the audit of Greenpeace. I’d heard Public Interest Watch was involved, and that this group gets almost all its funding from ExxonMobil. But, only yesterday did I discover that Dezenhall was behind it:

When Greenpeace USA found itself the subject of an Internal Revenue Service audit last year, the environmental group thought it knew whom to blame: Public Interest Watch, a Washington nonprofit heavily funded by Exxon Mobil Corp. PIW had filed an IRS complaint against Greenpeace in 2003, accusing it of abusing its tax-exempt status. Greenpeace assumed ExxonMobil had used PIW to harass a persistent critic.

But the story, first reported last month by The Wall Street Journal, was even more complicated. PIW, it turns out, has close ties to Dezenhall Resources, a communications firm known for stealthy assaults on its clients’ foes.

[…]

“We now know who’s doing the invisible work to undermine efforts to protect the environment,” says Kert Davies, Greenpeace USA’s research director. The IRS said last month that the group could remain tax-exempt.

Greenpeace thought its audit problem emanated from Public Interest Watch, which according to federal tax filings received $120,000 of its $124,000 in revenue from ExxonMobil in 2003, the year PIW filed its IRS complaint against Greenpeace. But a person familiar with the situation says Dezenhall Resources helped create PIW in 2002 specifically to prod the IRS to go after Greenpeace. Two of PIW’s three founding board members are former Dezenhall employees: James McCarthy and Christopher Meyers. McCarthy, who now has his own PR business and until last year used space in Dezenhall Resources’ Connecticut Avenue offices, declines to comment on whether the firm helped launch PIW. Meyers didn’t respond to phone messages.

What’s the point? Well, if PRISM hired someone like Dezenhall to plan their strategy, it means they’re really serious about the fight against open access — and willing to play dirty tricks. Luckily for us, it’s not EUREKA they’re really worried about, or even the arXiv. The big money is in biology and medicine. So, they’re worried about PubMed Central. And most of all, they’re scared of S.2695.

Posted by: John Baez on August 30, 2007 10:32 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

It is only because they are stupid and short-sighted that they don’t care about maths, the ArXiv and EUREKA.

Maths is much closer to providing a working solution to our publisher problems than biology is.

For a very large part of it, we really just have Don Knuth to thank. Mathematicians use TeX, but this doesn’t seem to have taken off in medicine yet. If you’re still in the dark ages of submitting things in MS Word, then you’re going to have to pay people good money to turn that tripe into something publishable.

But one day I figure people are going to start learning tricks from us.

Posted by: James Cranch on August 30, 2007 1:20 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

“But one day I figure people are going to start learning tricks from us.”

Indeed. Besides the typesetting issues, if S.2695 or something like it is passed, physics and mathematics are way ahead of most other fields in terms of having good infrastructure already in place for posting those federally-funded results online.

Posted by: Mark Meckes on August 30, 2007 2:06 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

Shhh!

Posted by: John Baez on August 30, 2007 2:19 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

Shhh!

Oh, I think that Dr. Evil is quite aware of the arXivs, and realizes that leaving a successful model of open-access standing will be a real impediment to achieving his main objectives.

I suspect that a Dezenhall-financed lawsuit against the arXivs will sooner-or-later materialize. You’ll note that one of the bullet-points on the PRISM website is:

  • opening the door to scientific censorship in the form of selective additions to or omissions from the scientific record;

So one scenario is

  • Dr. X has a paper accepted at some peer-reviewed journal, but reject from the arXivs. Dr. X sues (with Dezenhall’s support), claiming scientific censorship.

Another, less plausible, scenario is

  • Publisher X attempts to force the arXivs to remove certain paper(s), based on the copyright agreement signed by the author(s), after their paper(s) acceptance for publication in one of Publisher X’s journals.

This has always seemed an implausible scenario, because Publisher X would clearly be shooting itself in the foot by doing so. But, if you’re engaged in a fight to the death, losing a foot might be a small price to pay.

Posted by: Jacques Distler on August 30, 2007 3:32 PM | Permalink | PGP Sig | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

Dezenhall noted that if the other side is on the defensive, it doesn’t matter if they can discredit your statements, she added: ‘Media messaging is not the same as intellectual debate’.

I don’t think this guy is as clever as he’s made out to be. Here he is (unless the pronoun ‘she’ implies this quote is only from Susan Spilka but Dezenhall never said this), employed by a client whose product is defined by its reputation for intellectual scrupulousness, and then he goes and links its brand with a statement that conveys the precise opposite of that quality.

Sure, people who think things through will realize that he’s not being appointed to the editorial board of any of the journals, and this brand-linking business isn’t rationally defensible. But then, those people won’t buy his conflation of publishing business models with the peer review process either. But their brand depends on reputation - by even raising the doubt in anyone’s mind of whether other people will think that these journals have sufficient integrity, surely he undermines their market and ability to attract good material. (Not that this is a bad thing - I don’t want to see good material attracted to a source where it’s not feasibly accessible…)

Maybe he just genuinely doesn’t understand the client’s product, and who it’s begin marketed to. If so, they should definitely fire him. If not (and I suspect not), he’s saying these things knowing full well that he’s damaging his client’s brand - in which case, they should fire him anyway.

Posted by: Jeffrey Morton on August 30, 2007 6:18 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

Jeff writes:

I don’t think this guy is as clever as he’s made out to be.

You’re right.

Maybe he just genuinely doesn’t understand the client’s product, and who it’s being marketed to. If so, they should definitely fire him. If not (and I suspect not), he’s saying these things knowing full well that he’s damaging his client’s brand - in which case, they should fire him anyway.

To be fair, he wasn’t saying these things publicly: he was saying them in secret consultations with PRISM. But somehow they got leaked to Nature magazine.

Indeed, the way Dezenhall operates, anytime lots of people find out what he’s up to, it means he screwed up! He seems like more of a covert operative than a traditional PR guy. Consider:

  1. Nature somehow got ahold of emails describing his work for PRISM;
  2. BusinessWeek found out about his attempts to harrass Greenpeace on behalf of ExxonMobil;
  3. BusinessWeek also found out that Dezenhall was employed by Jeffrey Skilling, the boss of Enron, and that “internal Dezenhall communications from 2003 show that employees there discussed a plan to pay newspaper opinion writers to publish articles questioning the credibility and motivation of Enron whistleblower Sherron Watkins.”

Given this, he’s clearly not doing a good enough job of maintaining secrecy. Maybe 90% of his black-hat operations are successful: there’s no way to know! But now the mere fact that somebody is found to have hired him counts as a black mark against them. So, the American Association of Publishers would be wise to disassociate themselves from him. And in retrospect at least, it would have been wiser not to hire him at all.

Posted by: John Baez on September 1, 2007 11:40 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

“The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as ‘Public access equals government censorship’”

They can also try:

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

Posted by: Squark on August 30, 2007 8:21 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

This just in: Rockefeller University Press wants no part of PRISM’s plans! The story so far is summarized at this EUREKA page.

Posted by: Blake Stacey on August 30, 2007 9:36 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

With all this Wiki expertise materializing here, would anyone fancy setting up an nn-Category Wiki to accompany this blog? Where we could host copies of that material which isn’t just chat, but, you know, real content. Some place where John Baez would gradually develop the Tale of Groupoidification, for instance, keeping it from being spread over many entries and TWFs. Where we would gradually maybe work on material which we are either reviewing or – as happens from time to time – coming up with ourselves.

This suggestion (of accompanying the Café with a Wiki) is not new. Others here have expressed it already more empathetically even.

I was always in favor of this idea. But didn’t want to be involved in setting the thing up.

Now that I see with what ease and energy Blake, Bruce and others here have created that Eureka Wiki, I am wondering if it maybe would require a mere five minues to clone that and obtain a rudimentary nn-Café Wiki. Just to get started.

(Notice I am not talking about a replacement for the blog. I am talking about something accompanying it. Where we can point to from blog entries, and vice versa.)

Posted by: Urs Schreiber on August 30, 2007 10:20 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

I personally think that would be a great idea, Urs! And I hope I could contribute more to the idea than just this generic statement; I hesitate to commit myself firmly due to time constraints, but in principle I’m highly interested.

I would especially like to see wiki entries devoted to your many investigations, Urs.

Posted by: Todd Trimble on August 31, 2007 12:57 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

I’m not particularly happy with MediaWiki’s math support. Scope out a few Wikipedia articles on math topics to see if you like it and how it’s done; you can also create yourself a EUREKA account and play around there.

How do you imagine this wiki will be edited? Do you want a site edited by only a few people — say, the Café hosts and a few others on an invitation-only basis — or would you prefer something more open, like EUREKA? In the former situation, we might try setting up something like Instiki, which lets you keep the wiki proper a private entity and export a static version for public consumption.

Posted by: Blake Stacey on August 31, 2007 3:03 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

I’m not particularly happy with MediaWiki’s math support.

I’d be prepared not to be too picky about details. Maybe it’s better to get started than to worry about technical matters forever.

But, on the other hand …

we might try setting up something like Instiki,

… I would of course be delighted to get the most advanced math technology available.

Jacques Distlers demo page is certainly more than convincing.

Are you saying you’d be able and willing to set up something like this? The nn-Café mafia would be forever thankful.

or would you prefer something more open

You will maybe not be surprised to learn that I wouldn’t mind it be open. Our technical discussion at the nn-Café was neither spammed by math spammers, nor do I see need to complain that all our cool ideas are being stolen way too quickly. So if you ask me, let it be open.

But if semi-privacy should turn out to be the prerequisite for my co-hosts and Café-regulars to participate in technical discussion, then so be it.

Posted by: Urs Schreiber on August 31, 2007 3:16 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Instiki

In the former situation, we might try setting up something like Instiki, which lets you keep the wiki proper a private entity and export a static version for public consumption.

You could do it that way, but there’s a more convenient method: for any password-protected wiki, Instiki allows you to enable a “published” version, whose pages can be read, but not edited, by anyone.

While you can toggle whether a wiki has a published version at any time, it is not (currently) possible to mark individual pages as published, while keeping others entirely private.

You can, however, establish multiple wikis under one Instiki installation, allowing some to be completely open, others to be password-protected, but published, and others to be entirely private.

Posted by: Jacques Distler on August 31, 2007 4:33 PM | Permalink | PGP Sig | Reply to this

Re: Instiki

As a reasonably good model for a wiki devoted to a field of mathematics, I suggest the Knot Atlas organized by Dror Bar-Natan and Scott Morrison.

Some aspects are of course not directly applicable, since knot theory has so much more hard data attached to it. Even that will probably change though, if the trend towards finding invariants of n-categories continues!

Posted by: Stefan on August 31, 2007 8:33 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

2005 conversatiuon on $$$ in science versus science fiction books; Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

Making Light blog archives

Jonathan Vos Post ::: (view all by) ::: February 09, 2005, 01:23 PM:

My first offer for my first Science Fiction novel was $2,500 in 1972 for “The Ten Teeth of Terra: The Decadents” per an offer from Pat LoBrutto when he was at Ace, later retracted. I’ve written since to thank him: it would have been a Very Bad first novel, albeit written when I was 15.

Correcting for inflation, according to the Consumer Product Index, is an important normalization of the data. According to The Inflation Calculator

“if you were to buy exactly the same products in 1972 and 2003, they would cost you $2500 and $10853.36 respectively.”

Since then, my average SF novel submission sits on the desk of each editor for between 2 and 3 years, with roughly 1/3 of submissions lost outright, and I don’t yet have good statistics on how many editors per sale. The $8,000.00 book contract I had from Jim Baen was for nonfiction, even though it had plenty of SF references and style. Several chapters of said nofiction book “Computer Futures” have appeared in Science Fiction venues, such as “Human Destiny and the End of Time” [Quantum SF, No.39, Winter 1991/1992?, pp.??, Thrust Publications, 8217 Langport Terrace, Gaithersburg, MD 20877; ISSN 0198-6686] which in turn was acknowledged by Greg Benford who used a dozen excerpts, transfigured into italics, in his novels of the galactic core.

Moral 1: a contract in the hand is worth N in the bush, for some value of N being experimentally determined.

Moral 2: really cool ideas propagate more rapidly in smaller particles than books, with articles faster than books, excerpts in other peoples’ novels faster than in your own novels, letters to the editor faster than articles, and blogs approaching the speed of light.

Moral 3: editorial submission is a stochastic process, apparently following Markov Chain statistics, with several absorbing barriers, namely sale, return of mansucript, death of editor, and/or loss of manuscript (lossy transmission).

Jonathan Vos Post ::: (view all by) ::: February 11, 2005, 03:55 AM:

Andrew:

“You can get paid for books?”

The paradox of academic publishing is that the publishers get the work from the writers so cheap (even negative cost) and then turn around and sell the work profitably to the very universities that employ the academic writers.

For Mathematics and Science journals in the USA, where authors typically have to PAY the journals a “page charge” – tell me this isn’t vanity publishing! – the total profit for publishers is estimated at $300 to $400 million per year. An editorial in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society speculates that mathematicians accept this without complaint because they feel that, since the articles are written by mathematicians for mathematicians, they are “our” journals.

Dr. Geoff Landis, OTOH, says he’s seen a study somewhere that the indirect lifetime value to an academic scientist for a published journal article is roughly $10,000 in terms of getting promotions and tenure sooner.

Can anyone help me and Geoff with the reputed myriad-dollar figure, while I dig up the AMS editorial for a skeptical reply?

The VP of Academic Affairs at Woodbury, where I taught Math for 2 years until recently, thrilled a Faculty Senate meeting by saying that he was close to Presidential approval to issue awards for faculty achievements: “publish a book, win $1,000.” The Dean of Faculty, who’d just published a small book about kayaking the last California wild river, beamed. I started counting my chickens on the grounds that my 360+ short math/science publications in 2004 alone, including refereed and edited online pieces, must be the equivalent of at least two or three books. Then came the pink slip…

Charlie Stross ::: (view all by) ::: February 11, 2005, 08:57 AM:

Getting back to Patrick’s original topic …

I have, in the past couple of years, been asked to keep quiet about the money at stake in a book deal …

… by my agent. While the offer was on the table but not yet officially accepted, and she was trying to get another publisher to make a counter-offer.

(Funnily enough, I went along with this :)

Otherwise, no: I don’t think I’ve ever wrriten for an organization that asked me not to discuss what they were paying me.

Paul Robichaux ::: (view all by) ::: February 11, 2005, 09:55 AM:

The norm in computer book publishing, which is the only publishing sector I know anything about, is for contracts to have a confidentiality clause that forbids disclosure of advance or royalty amounts. In the last few years, contracts I’ve seen from Microsoft Press, Sybex, and Pearson have included this language; I don’t remember offhand if O’Reilly’s contracts have it or not (but I doubt it).
Castiron ::: (view all by) ::: February 11, 2005, 01:07 PM:

JvP:

“The paradox of academic publishing is that the publishers get the work from the writers so cheap (even negative cost) and then turn around and sell the work profitably to the very universities that employ the academic writers.”

Profitably? *scratches head* On what planet?

Okay, if you restrict this statement to scientific publishing, as JvP’s further comments suggest, then that may be accurate, depending on the publisher. However, I doubt that many academic presses make much if any profit on, say, Latin American literary criticism books.

The university press I work for has no confidentiality clauses on advances (on the rare occasions where they happen) or royalties; our authors are welcome to brag about how their royalty check enabled them to supersize that burger combo.

Jonathan Vos Post ::: (view all by) ::: February 12, 2005, 02:17 AM:

Castiron:

“… Elsevier and Academic Press journals are a highly profitable part of a big corporation. Bertelsmann has recently divested Springer, and now Springer, Kluwer, and Birkhauser are owned by an investment company (who did not buy these publishers in order to make less profit than before)…. [The] AMS [American Mathematical Society] charges under 22 cents per page for its primary journals and makes a decent profit that subsidizes other AMS activities. The Annals of Mathematics, Pacific Journal, and geometry and Topology are cheaper yet. On the other hand, the big commercial journals typically charge in the range of 40 cents to over 100 cents per page….” A good source for price information is either
http://www.ams.org/membership/journal-survey.html
or
http://www.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/~rehmann/BIB/AMS/Publisher.html

“In an article in The Mathematical Intelligencer, John Ewing writes: ‘a rough estimate suggests that the revenue from each article in commercial journals is $4,000.00.’ (Imagine a 20-page paper sold at 50 cents/page to 400 subscribers.) ‘Therefore, the 25,000 mathematics articles in commercial journals in 2001 generated about $100 million in revenue for the commercial publishers.’ This is serious money, much of it profit. Roughly speaking, it takes a billion-dollar business to get that sort of profit….”

“Fleeced” by Rob Kirby, Notices Associate Editor, University of California Berkeley
Notices of the AMS, February 2004, p.181

Jonathan Vos Post ::: (view all by) ::: February 14, 2005, 10:20 AM:

Charlie’s Diary [Stross]

has an interesting posting for Wed, 09 Feb 2005 that ties together “a rather neat article in First Monday, musicians and artists for the most part don’t earn their living through intellectual property rights; there’s a power law at work, with maybe the top ten individuals in a given country earning twice as much as the next 200 put together, and more than the bottom 10,000 professionals in the field put together” and Tobias Buckell’s survey of SF writers’ book advances (in the USA), with “Galambosianism.”

This latter was a short-lived doctrine of intellectual property absolutism, founded in the 1960s by Joseph Andrew Galambos… and descended from libertarianism and/or the teachings of Ayn Rand. The primary concept of Galambosianism was that one’s ideas were one’s “primary property”, a higher form of property than physical assets (which were merely “secondary property”), and second only to one’s life (one’s “primordial property”).

Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post on September 1, 2007 9:06 PM | Permalink | Reply to this
Read the post Toward a Higher-Dimensional Wiki
Weblog: The n-Category Café
Excerpt: Let's talk about setting up a wiki for n-category theory and other aspects of higher-dimensional algebra!
Tracked: September 2, 2007 1:33 PM

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

James Cranch, a topology postdoc at the University of Sheffield, has assembled useful material for a letter-writing campaign against PRISM.

(I’m going to a topology conference at Sheffield this weekend! Maybe I’ll meet him.)

Blake Stacey has worked wonders improving the EUREKA article on PRISM. I just added a link to Cranch’s page.

Posted by: John Baez on September 5, 2007 3:36 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Lies and damned lies, but no statistics

I’m just a PhD student!

Posted by: James Cranch on September 5, 2007 6:39 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Lies and damned lies, but no statistics

Whoops! I forgot that a “postgraduate student” in the UK is roughly what we call a “graduate student” in the US — not a “postdoc”.

Anyway, thanks for setting up that page and telling the topology mailing list about it.

Posted by: John Baez on September 5, 2007 7:33 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

The New Scientist notes: ” Publishers prepare for war over open access” and provides ” the leaked proposal from Dezenhall”.

Posted by: T on September 20, 2007 2:08 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

Since the “leaked proposal” provided by Giles is a PDF, I made a text version to facilitate quoting and whatnot. This development has also been noted at EUREKA.

Posted by: Blake Stacey on September 20, 2007 9:32 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

Hmm… I just put a link to the PDF version on Dezenhall’s page at EUREKA. The version you keyed in should also be included, if it’s okay with you.

Posted by: John Baez on September 21, 2007 1:24 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”

The NIH mandate for Open Access has been signed into law. See remarks by Peter Suber and Bora Zivkovic, among many others.

Posted by: Blake Stacey on December 28, 2007 4:02 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

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