To follow comments on Declan Butler's June 20 story in Nature on PLoS' finances, there are two places to look: the Nature Newsblog and Declan's own blog. There are now comments in both places.
Here's an excerpt from Jan Velterop's comment on Declan's blog. Jan is the Open Access Director at Springer and the former publisher of BioMed Central.
The fact that the PLoS is not breaking even at this stage is not surprising. There seems to be a consensus in the publishing world that new journals - at least in the traditional subscription model - take about seven years to reach break-even. I personally think it’s more like 10 years; if ever. And here we are talking not just of new journals, but of new journals published in a new publishing model. The PLoS has done remarkably well, given all that.
But even if the top two PLoS journals don’t reach break-even, that’s not the end of the story. There is a well-known phenomenon in business that’s know as ‘loss-leaders’. It is quite conceivable that these two PLoS journals fulfil that role, pushing the PLoS brand reputation to great heights, and then enabling the organisation to capitalise on that brand with smaller, subordinate journals (’specialist’ or ‘community’ titles), which do make the surplus needed to sustain not only themselves but also the flagship loss-leaders.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/22/2006 09:27:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
