My Third Letter to the APA Trustees

A Poor Quality DSM-5 in Unacceptable

By Allen Frances, MD

DSM-5 press coverage has suddenly exploded—more than 100 stories from all around the world were published in just the last three weeks (see title and links below). The press is uniformly negative and extremely damaging to DSM-5, to APA, and to the credibility of psychiatry.

The APA responses have been few, unconvincing, and lacking in substance. Also troubling, 47 mental health organizations have expressed their opposition to DSM-5 by endorsing a petition requesting it to have a scientific review independent of APA. And many users are planning to boycott DSM-5 altogether by substituting ICD-10-CM (which will be freely available on the internet). It is fair to say that DSM-5 has become an object of general public and professional scorn.

What would Mel Sabshin be doing in this time of crisis? Of course, Mel never would have allowed APA to get into this mess—but once in any crisis he was an expert in damage control. Were he here today, Mel would certainly recommend that you immediately cut the DSM-5 losses to prevent its inflicting further damage on APA, on psychiatry, and most importantly on our patients.

The entire blog entry is here.

As Journal Boycott Grows, Elsevier Defends Its Practices

By Josh Fischman
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally Published January 31, 2012

A protest against Elsevier, the world's largest scientific journal publisher, is rapidly gaining momentum since it began as an irate blog post at the end of January. By Tuesday evening, about 2,400 scholars had put their names to an online pledge not to publish or do any editorial work for the company's journals, including refereeing papers.

The boycott is growing so quickly—it had about 1,800 signers on Monday—that Elsevier officials on Tuesday broke their official silence to respond to protesters' accusations that they charge too much and support laws that will keep research findings bottled up behind a company paywall.

"Over the past 10 years, our prices have been in the lowest quartile in the publishing industry," said Alicia Wise, Elsevier's director of universal access. "Last year our prices were lower than our competitors'. I'm not sure why we are the focus of this boycott, but I'm very concerned about one dissatisfied scientist, and I'm concerned about 2,000."

She added that her company improves access rather than impeding it, and said that Internet downloads from some journals increased by as much as 40 percent when Elsevier added them to collections it sells to libraries.

Protesters disagree, and say Elsevier is emblematic of an abusive publishing industry. "The government pays me and other scientists to produce work, and we give it away to private entities," says Brett S. Abrahams, an assistant professor of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "Then they charge us to read it." Mr. Abrahams signed the pledge on Tuesday after reading about it on Facebook.

Those views highlight a split that could spell serious trouble for journal publishers, and for researchers. Price complaints are not new, but some observers say this is the first time that the suppliers of journal content—the scientists—are upset enough to cut the supply line. But, if publishers are correct, those scientists could cut themselves off from valuable research tools.

The Boycotters' Complaints

According to the boycotters, Elsevier, which publishes over 2,000 journals including the prestigious Cell and The Lancet, is abusing academic researchers in three areas. First there are the prices. Then the company bundles subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable ones, forcing libraries to spend money to buy things they don't want in order to get a few things they do want. And, most recently, Elsevier has supported a proposed federal law, the Research Works Act (HR 3699), that could prevent agencies like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by grant recipients freely available.

The entire story is here.