bjoern.brembs.blog » Is de Gruyter’s lobby-by-proxy not lobbyism?

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-09-23

Summary:

Sven Fund, CEO of the German publishing house de Gruyter was recently interviewed by Richard Poynder in his widely read interview series on open access. In the interview, he first avoided answering the question if de Gruyter had ever lobbied against open access. However, in a later correspondence with Richard Poynder, he made unambiguously clear: 'Just for the record: No, De Gruyter has never lobbied against OA.' Now, this statement seems somewhat surprising, as de Gruyter is a member of the 'Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels', the trade organization of publishers in Germany. This organization states itself that it 'accompanies the recent legislative reforms with intense lobbying' (own translation). In other words, de Gruyter may not have a 'Vice President of Government Relations' as Elsevier has in Angelika Lex, but it is a paying member of the one organization that does the lobbying. The kind of changes the German publishers would like to see in this legislation is quite obvious: 'a right to second publication [i.e., in green open access repositories] carries no benefits and will cost the tax-payer money that is dearly needed in research and elsewhere' (my loose translation). So, has de Gruyter not obviously paid their own trade organization to lobby against open access? Does Mr. Fund think we cannot enter [börsenverein 'open access'] into a search engine and just click on the first two links that come up? This is a prime example of the raised middle finger publishers have been prominently presenting towards academia at large for the last decade. Why should anyone ever deal with organizations like this again? In a few weeks, on October 10, I’ll be on a panel with Mr. Fund at the Frankfurt Book Fair. We’ll see if these obscene gestures of publishers towards academics become a topic of the discussion."

Link:

http://bjoern.brembs.net/2013/09/is-de-gruyters-lobby-by-proxy-not-lobbyism/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.de_gruyter

Date tagged:

09/23/2013, 08:28

Date published:

09/23/2013, 04:28