Peer review: Does it have to be expensive?

Oh, this is good. In a story titled PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access, Nature says the American Association of Publishers has hired the powerful PR firm Dezenhall Resources.

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Under siege? Nature quoted an AAP vice-president as saying "It's common to hire a PR firm when you're under siege. [T]he AAP needs to counter messages from groups such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS), an open-access publisher and prominent advocate of free access to information." The story was also reported on slashdot.

Just because they're not super-expensive doesn't mean they aren't peer-reviewed. According to Nature, "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." The story also reported that Dezenhall "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'."

Note: It's actually not a 'free-information' movement, since U.S. citizens are funding substantial scientific research with their tax dollars (via NIH). So why shouldn't there be wider access to those research findings?

Meanwhile, across the pond. There's also a push for more open access in Europe. In the wake of a recent report, EU Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe, a consortium is sponsoring a petition to demonstrate support for open access and for the recommendations in the report.