On sponsorship, transparency, scholarly publishing, and open access

[Richard Poynder]

​Sponsorship in the research and library communities is pervasive today, and scholarly publishers are some of the most generous providers of it. While the benefits of this sponsorship to the research community at large are debatable, publishers gain a great deal of soft power from dispensing money in this way. And they use this soft power to help them contain, control and shape the changes scholarly communication is undergoing, often in ways that meet their needs more than the needs of science and of scientists.

 

This sponsorship also often takes place without adequate transparency.

 

These are the kinds of issues explored in this (pdf) document http://bit.ly/2taOuoL, which includes some examples of publisher sponsorship, and the associated problems of non-transparency that often go with it. In particular, there is a detailed case study of a series of interviews conducted by Library Journal with leading OA advocates that was sponsored by Dove Medical Press.

 

Amongst those interviewed was the de facto leader of the OA movement Peter Suber. Suber gave three separate interviews to LJ, but not once was he informed when invited that the interviews were sponsored, or that they would be flanked with ads for Dove – even though he made it clear after the first interview that he was not happy to be associated with the publisher in this way.

 

http://bit.ly/2taOuoL​