Peter Suber has relayed a message which has been widely posted.
This memo from “ACS Insider” has been sent directly to many librarians and university administrators, and to at least one public listserv, NASW-Freelance from the National Association of Science Writers. I received a copy from one of the recipients. I don’t know anything about the pseudonymous author.I’ve been an ACS [American Chemical Society] employee for many, many years, but I’ve grown concerned with the direction of the organization. I’m sending this email to alert you that ACS has grown increasingly corporate in its structure and focus. Management is much more concerned with getting bonuses and growing their salaries rather than doing what is best for membership. For instance, Madeleine Jacobs now pulling in almost $1 million in salary and bonuses. That’s almost 3X what Alan Leshner makes over at AAAS, and almost double what Drew Gilpin Faust makes to lead Harvard.
I think Madeleine is smart, but I’m not quite sure if she’s in the same category as Dr. Faust. She doesn’t even have a PhD!
What really concerns me is a move by ACS management to undermine the open-access movement. Rudy Baum has been leading the fight with several humorous editorials — one in which he referred to open-access in the pages of C&EN as “socialized science.” ACS has also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in membership money to hire a company to lobby against open-access.
What troubles me the most is when ACS management decided to hire Dezenhall Resources to fight open-access. Nature got hold of some internal ACS emails written by Brian Crawford that discussed how Dezenhall could help us undermine open-access. Dezenhall later created a group called Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM), which has this silly argument that open-access means “no more peer-review.”
If you’re wondering why ACS is fighting this, it’s because people like Rudy Baum, Brian Crawford and other ACS managers receive bonuses based on how much money the publishing division generates. Hurt the publishing revenue; you hurt their bonuses.
I’m hoping that sending out this email will get people to force ACS executives to become more transparent in how they act and spend membership money. Not to mention their crazy need for fatter salaries.
It’s time for some change. If you want to check out the sources for this information, there is a wiki site that has all the articles and documents outlining what I’ve just written. You can find it here.
Those of inside ACS know that it’s time for things to change. But management won’t alter their behavior. The money is just too good.PS: Comments
- The claim that ACS executives “receive bonuses based on how much money the publishing division generates” was also made by Paul Thacker in the Summer 2007 issue of SEJournal. See my blog comments on it from last week.
PMR: I write this with sadness and concern. I know many members and staff in ACS and visited and spoke to the publishing group 2 years ago at their invitation. I have no idea who the writer is and don’t want to. I am not American, nor a member of ACS, so it’s only partly my business. Except that the ACS is the largest chemical society in the world and has effectively enormous power, not just in the US but also globally. Why does it matter?
A commercial publisher – as Alma Swan argued – has a responsibility to its shareholders. It must make as much money as possible, subject only to legality and, possibly general human morality. But a learned society has a duty to its membership, and more widely to the community. Charters of such societies often require a commitment to national and international concerns, which for chemistry might be education, health, safety, pollution, climate change, etc.
The concern over open access is very serious. Increasingly we look to societies for leadership in difficult issues, such as climate change. The arguments depend in part on factual data, which besides requiring absolute integrity of publication, increasingly also demand open availability. An organisation in conflict with a large portion of its constituency and with what appears to be serious internal turmoil may find it difficult to give global leads when these are required.
This is indeed disturbing. As an American, ACS member, and PhD Chemistry student this is really disappointing and makes me wonder what the future holds as a future researcher and scientific author. If this continues I hate to think where we’ll be in 20 years. Thanks for bringing this up PMR.
So does anyone have any ideas on how we can pursuade ACS to change? I’m not sure the usual forms of protest would work. We can obviously resign our memberships, but that will have no sizeable impact and will just make ACS conference attendance more expensive. We could refuse to publish in ACS journals or to attend ACS conferences but that would also likely have minimal impact (unless we boycotted JCIM en masse) and could hurt our careers. More positively, we could try to raise awareness in the chemistry community of the benefits of open access in our own respective spheres, and encourage chemists to send letters to ACS leadership expressing their concern and desire for open access.