More on the AAP PR campaign

Mark Chillingworth, Nature uncovers PR attack on open access, Information World Review, January 25, 2007.  Excerpt:

Scientific journal Nature has discovered that a PR man whose career has been spent putting a positive spin on fraudsters like Jeffrey Skilling of Enron and denying scientific evidence of climate change, has been hired by STM publishers Wiley and Elsevier.

Eric Dezenhall and his company have been hired to attack the open access publishing movement, mainly in the US. The spin doctor has authored a book on his practises titled, Nail 'Em! Confronting High Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses.

Jim Giles, a News and Features reporter at the London office of Nature was handed an email thread by a source revealing discussions Dezenhall has had with employees at Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, American Chemical Society as well as the Association of American Publishers (AAP) regarding a strategy to deal with open access debate....

The article is well worth reading...and will certainly add a new dimension to the open access debate and do little for the reputations of the publishers involved.