Collaborative Chemistry

I thought long and hard about publishing this blog, so it is with a sense of sadness and complete loss that I write these words. My interest in trying to publish in Open Access (OA) journals died yesterday.

Yesterday should have been an exciting day with a new article coming out in an OA journal, the culmination of a year and half of real time and many hundreds of hours of work with collaborators. Unfortunately for me it was spoilt at the 11th hour by (IMHO) an over-reaching OA publisher that wanted complete control over a press release (that had been crafted by many people including a professional journalist to make it pretty accessible to the non-expert). I wanted to convey what I have already discussed in several presentations, most recently at the ACS. The topic and the repercussions of the work are cause to give me “nightmares”. That did not go down very well.

Here is the press release that came out and below are two statements in the email from the publisher and how I originally intended them (bold is text removed). The collaborating group obviously made the changes before the press release appeared on their website. I was only alerted to why the changes were made after the fact.

You may think as I have been told …”Put it down to experience”, “these things happen”, “grow a thicker skin”, “don’t come off as a jerk or a hothead” ….In all my time publishing and the few times a press release has come out, I have never seen this kind of control over ones own words happen. In the big scheme of things a press release is ‘water off a ducks back’, but the implications are that this OA publisher, who was paid to publish the article (which BTW was not NIH funded), demands control over what you say in the press release. I think others need to be aware what can happen. For me this is just as big a ‘nightmare’ as the problem we pointed out in the paper. I will not be submitting this blog to the publisher for approval.