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equals government censorship,” and suggested that they try to “paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles.” (Both notions are false: open access doesn’t involve censorship, nor does it mean giving up peer review.) When asked about the move to hire Dezenhall, a vice president at the publishers’ association replied, “It’s common to hire a PR firm when you’re under siege.” Not long after receiving Dezenhall’s advice, the publishers’ association launched an organization called PRISM, the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine. PRISM began a publicity initiative arguing against open access policies such as the NIH policy, claiming that open access would threaten “the economic viability of journals and the independent system of peer review” and potentially introduce “selective bias into the scientific record.”

The Dezenhall-PRISM story is just one skirmish of many in the battle between some traditional scientific publishers and the open access movement. On the one hand, we have a situation where open access poses a threat to the profits and ultimately the jobs of both the traditional scientific publishing companies and the not-for-profit scientific societies. But balanced against this is a marvelous opportunity: as examples such as the arXiv and PLoS and the NIH open access policy show, it’s now feasible to make all scientific knowledge freely available to all of humanity. And that will bring astonishing benefits, benefits far too great to refuse merely to preserve a few successful businesses. As occurs so often with the introduction of new technologies, we are weighing a great good for society against harm for a few. The traditional publishers who are battling against open access should have our sympathy, but not our support.

Science Blogging

In April of 2008, author Simon Singh wrote a piece in the Guardian newspaper, where he criticized the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) for claiming “that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organization is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.” The BCA responded by suing Singh under UK libel laws, claiming that the effectiveness of its treatments was supported by a “plethora of evidence.” The case received a lot of public attention in the UK, and fourteen months after Singh’s article the BCA released a seven-page document describing evidence for the effectiveness of chiropractic treatments.

What happened next was unexpected. Almost immediately, the evidence released by the BCA was investigated and torn apart by an ad hoc group of science bloggers, acting on their own initiative. Here’s how the events were described in an article in The Lawyer written by Robert Dougans, a lawyer who acted for Singh in the case, and David Allen Green, a blogger who had been covering the case:

In less than a day, the credibility of this evidence—and indeed that of the BCA for commending it—was destroyed. A dozen or so scientist-bloggers, including a Fellow of the Royal Society, were able to track down and assess each of the scientific papers cited by the BCA and were able to show beyond doubt that these papers did not support the BCA position at all. This was a stunning and devastating blogging exercise, and when it was formally repeated by the British Medical Journal a few weeks later it was almost an afterthought. The technical evidence of a claimant in a controversial case had simply been demolished—and seen to be demolished—but not by the conventional means of contrary expert evidence and expensive forensic cross-examination, but by specialist bloggers. And there is no reason why such specialist bloggers would not do the same in a similar case.

Dougans and Green called the process “wiki litigation,” and commented that its importance to the case went well beyond demolishing the BCA’s evidence. They said that blogging substantially