If you need an excellent refutation to the latest anti-OA lobbying effort by the American Association of Publishers, PRISM, à la Dezenhall please see Peter Suber's Open Access News.
Stevan Harnad on the American Scientist Open Access Forum has announced an Exercise to See whether PRISM has managed to come up with any substantive point that has not already been refuted many times over, e.g. in:
Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11160/.
No luck here - I'm not seeing anything here which is not old and tired as well as ludicrous. On the plus side, if you enjoy fiction of the paranoid conspiracy genre and your local public library is closed due to a strike, this could provide a bit of light reading material.
Under "Actions" the bit about protecting the millions of dollars of investments of the poor private sector strikes me (neglecting to mention that these millions of dollars - plus much more, in profits, comes from the public purse), not as a new anti-OA argument, but nevertheless a new anti-OA-lobbying approach with above-average humorous potential. Does this count, Stevan?
