The Scientist.com takes on the American Chemical Society. Some of it is a little silly, discussing an anonymous email that implies the ACS hates open access and bonuses they pay executives are tied to that. No proof to that and TheScientist.com seems a little put out that executives make money on profitability. No kidding? They want to make money and expect executives with six figure incomes to do that?
My only dealing with them was sort of ridiculous. An author did a pretty good article and we wanted to reprint it rather than condense it into a news article. Their response; not only did they not allow reprints, we would need to fill out an application even to do a blurb with a link to the original article so they don't seem to understand fair use either.
Did it make them a little money preventing a reprint or link? I am not sure. Their author, and a link to the ACS publication, was not seen at all by potentially hundreds of thousands of readers though I can't say it would have led to subscriptions. However, their author may well have been cited by other people, which has value to the scientists when it comes review time - so the ACS would have made itself more valuable to people doing the writing.
My $.02 anyway. The link above goes to the TheScientist.com article.
