Anti-open access group loses another supporter

Posted by Andrea Gawrylewski

http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/53685/

Another university press has disassociated itself from PRISM -- the Partnership for Integrity in Science and Medicine -- an anti-open access advocacy group established by the Association of American Publishers (AAP). MIT Press director Ellen Faran resigned from AAP's Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported yesterday (October 4).

Faran told The Chronicle in an Email, "The Prism Web site continues to give the incorrect impression that it has the unanimous support of the Executive Council [of the AAP]."

Our senior editor Alison McCook blogged last month that the president and director of Columbia University Press, James D. Jordan, resigned from the same AAP division. And as Peter Suber, open access news guru, posted on his blog , MIT Press joins eight other prominent publishers who have distanced themselves from PRISM since its inception in August of this year.

Some universities have ended their relationships with open access publishers as I reported in August when Yale did not renew its contract with BioMed Central. But the director of MIT libraries told me for that article that MIT is committed to open access publishing.