Documentary makes powerful plea for open access publishing
by Michael Cook | 6 Oct 2018 | 1 comment
Nothing warms the cockles of the heart like righteous outrage, so quite a few readers of BioEdge will be interested in Paywall, a documentary on academic publishing. Its argument is simple. Knowledge should be free. Academic journals aren’t free. Therefore the system is broken. Why does a US$25.2 billion industry coast along with profit margins of about 30% -- when an “evil corporation” like Walmart only has a profit margin of 3%? The world needs open access publishing!
The attack on the current model may be unfair, but you can’t say that it isn’t provocative and fascinating. Paywall: the business of scholarship is well worth watching – if you can organise a screening, because it costs individuals US$39.95 to download.
Here’s what The Lancet (whose publisher, Elsevier, is one of the main villains targeted by director Jason Schmitt) had to say about Paywall:
The film could ... have an impact on academics, many of whom still do not understand how profitable publishers are and how academic institutions could—if they worked together—make science available to all and retrieve the profits for more research.More openness in science, the talking heads make clear, means better scholarship, more innovation, higher quality, more equality, and a better chance of solving fundamental problems like climate change, poverty, and the pushing back of disease. That publishers are making huge profits from restricting access to research is not a marginal problem, says István Rév, a professor of history and political science from Budapest, it's holding back the solution to fundamental problems. Indeed, he adds, the profits of publishers are one of the causes of rapidly rising tuition fees. Some colleges are having to close in part because of the continuing high cost of journals. “It's a catastrophe”, says Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication and director of the Harvard Open Access Project.
Sunday, October 7, 2018
About five minutes before I was about to entrust this newsletter to MailChimp, I heard that the Canadian Medical Association had just withdrawn from the World Medical Association after the WMA's annual meeting in Reykjavík.
The CMA said that the trigger for this dramatic turn of events was the highly unethical behaviour of the incoming president of the WMA, Dr Leonid Eidelman. It accused Dr Eidelman of plagiarism. This was true and not very smart. A few sentences in Dr Eidelman’s inaugural address to the assembly had been lifted from the inaugural address of a former president of the CMA, Dr Chris Simpson. Since Dr Simpson was one of the CMA’s delegates in Reykjavík, it was highly unlikely that this would go unnoticed. Apparently other passages had also been copied from “various websites, blogs and news articles, without appropriate attribution to the authors”.
"As an organization that holds itself as the arbiter of medical ethics at the global level, the WMA has failed to uphold its own standards,” said Dr Gigi Osler, the current CMA president. “The CMA cannot, in all good conscience, continue to be a member of such an organization.”
The WMA Council and the Assembly accepted an apology from Dr Eidelman. He said that he had relied upon speechwriters – a plausible excuse, as he is a Latvian who emigrated to Israel and who speaks English with a heavy accent.
This is not the first time that a WMA president has been accused of moral failings. The immediate past president, Dr Ketan Desai, was elected while facing criminal charges for corruption in India. At the time, medical ethicist Art Caplan urged the WMA to ditch him as morally compromised. It didn’t.
So the Canadians’ reaction seems disproportionate. It is more likely that it was prompted by the WMA’s firm opposition to euthanasia, which the CMA vigorously supports. One of the CMA delegates, Dr Jeff Blackmer, posted a bitter tweet about the irony that an unethical plagiarist had once openly criticised him for being unethical in backing euthanasia.
No doubt euthanasia will continue to split the medical profession. Any comments from readers?
The CMA said that the trigger for this dramatic turn of events was the highly unethical behaviour of the incoming president of the WMA, Dr Leonid Eidelman. It accused Dr Eidelman of plagiarism. This was true and not very smart. A few sentences in Dr Eidelman’s inaugural address to the assembly had been lifted from the inaugural address of a former president of the CMA, Dr Chris Simpson. Since Dr Simpson was one of the CMA’s delegates in Reykjavík, it was highly unlikely that this would go unnoticed. Apparently other passages had also been copied from “various websites, blogs and news articles, without appropriate attribution to the authors”.
"As an organization that holds itself as the arbiter of medical ethics at the global level, the WMA has failed to uphold its own standards,” said Dr Gigi Osler, the current CMA president. “The CMA cannot, in all good conscience, continue to be a member of such an organization.”
The WMA Council and the Assembly accepted an apology from Dr Eidelman. He said that he had relied upon speechwriters – a plausible excuse, as he is a Latvian who emigrated to Israel and who speaks English with a heavy accent.
This is not the first time that a WMA president has been accused of moral failings. The immediate past president, Dr Ketan Desai, was elected while facing criminal charges for corruption in India. At the time, medical ethicist Art Caplan urged the WMA to ditch him as morally compromised. It didn’t.
So the Canadians’ reaction seems disproportionate. It is more likely that it was prompted by the WMA’s firm opposition to euthanasia, which the CMA vigorously supports. One of the CMA delegates, Dr Jeff Blackmer, posted a bitter tweet about the irony that an unethical plagiarist had once openly criticised him for being unethical in backing euthanasia.
No doubt euthanasia will continue to split the medical profession. Any comments from readers?
 Michael Cook Editor BioEdge |  |  |  |
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