Scientific journal Nature has discovered that a PR man whose career has been spent putting a positive spin on fraudsters like Jeffrey Skilling of Enron and denying scientific evidence of climate change, has been hired by STM publishers Wiley and Elsevier.

Eric Dezenhall and his company have been hired to attack the open access publishing movement, mainly in the US. The spin doctor has authored a book on his practises titled, Nail 'Em! Confronting High Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses.

Jim Giles, a News and Features reporter at the London office of Nature was handed an email thread by a source revealing discussions Dezenhall has had with employees at Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, American Chemical Society as well as the Association of American Publishers (AAP) regarding a strategy to deal with open access debate.

According to Nature, Dezenhall advised them to "focus on simple messages, such as "public access equals government censorship"" and to paint a negative picture of a world without peer review. With Elsevier often deemed the big bad bully of the scientific world, Dezenhall controversially recommends that they join forces with groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington DC think tank that used oil industry money to poor scorn on claims by many leading scientific groups and Greenpeace of the affects of climate change.

Dezenhall is believed to be charging between $300,000 to 500,000 for the campaign. Susan Spilka, director of corporate communications at Wiley was quoted by Nature as saying in the email thread, "Media messaging is not the same as intellectual debate," and that publishers have reacted too defensively by making precise statements about open access.

Nature has also seen minutes of an AAP meeting from last year showed that particular attention was paid to PubMed Central, which has pioneered open access publishing in the US.

The article is well worth reading, click here, and will certainly add a new dimension to the open access debate and do little for the reputations of the publishers involved.