PRISM

= Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine, lobby group against Open Access

Description

Peter Suber:

"Here's another organization deserving a section to itself: the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM), launched in August by the Executive Committee of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP/PSP). The story began in January 2007, when Jim Giles, a reporter at Nature, published leaked documents showing that the AAP/PSP, American Chemical Society, Elsevier, and Wiley met with PR consultant Eric Dezenhall, who recommended that the publishers combat government OA mandates by "equat[ing] traditional publishing models with peer review" and using messages like "public access equals government censorship". He estimated a fee of $300,000 to $500,000 for a six-month campaign. The AAP/PSP hired him, and the August launch of PRISM is the apparent result of his advice. The PRISM Web site repeated the hand-waving about peer review and the Orwellian slogan about censorship. If anything, it went further, asserting that open access "open[s] the floodgates to non-peer reviewed junk science". The response was immediate, widespread criticism and ridicule. In short order, nine important academic publishers publicly disavowed PRISM or distanced themselves from it: Cambridge University Press, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Columbia University Press, MIT Press, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, Pennsylvania State University Press, Rockefeller University Press, and the University of Chicago Press. James Jordan, the director of Columbia University Press, and Ellen Faran, director of the MIT Press, resigned from the AAP/PSP Executive Council in protest. In mid-September PRISM toned down some of the inflammatory rhetoric on its Web site, but did not add the disclaimer requested by Rockefeller University Press "indicating that the views presented on the site do not necessarily reflect those of all members of the AAP." A week later, the AAP/PSP quietly removed all mention of PRISM from its front page, though it did not take down the PRISM site itself. In November, the Charleston Advisor's Readers' Choice Awards gave PRISM its "Lemon Award." The citation said, "These publishers should not bite the hand that feeds them." From beginning to end, PRISM billed itself as a coalition but never publicly identified any of its members." (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0011.110)