Just a few years ago, open-access (OA) publishing was regarded as a fringe activity by the big publishers. Since then, however, companies have slowly started to break ranks and offer something resembling OA. Springer Group’s recent purchase of BioMed Central, however, has thrust it from being a ‘toe in the water’ OA publisher to probably the number-one OA publisher in terms of articles published.
BioMed Central was founded by Science Navigation Group and began publishing in May 2000. It was the first fully-commercial OA publisher at a time when major publishers were saying that they could not see how OA could be commercially sustainable....
BMC now publishes some 196 journals, most of which follow the... ‘author-pays’ model. It claims to have 760,000 registered readers and, in 2007, recorded 25 million page views per month....
[T]he company has said there are no immediate plans to increase BMC charges [even though Springer Open Choice charges are already higher], which have proved a major draw to authors and have resulted in rapid growth for BMC’s titles.
[Matthew Cockerill, publisher of BMC] said that OA journals had now established themselves, and that many titles attain high impact factors and citation rates from Thomson ISI. He said the industry had clearly moved past the complaints of subscription publishers that [fee-based OA journals] would be motivated purely by commercial interests.
‘I have not heard that one for quite a long time now. Journals become successful precisely because they do not publish any old tat. Our editors have no financial interest in choosing articles and the success of our titles shows that the quality is the same,’ said Cockerill.
‘Open-access and subscription publishing are not necessarily in competition,’ he continued. ‘Derk Haank, our CEO, has said that Springer is agnostic when it comes to business model. There will always be an opportunity for publishers to add value to information and to sell that for a subscription.’
Cockerill believes that BMC will be able to grow even faster under Springer’s wing, and its business model may even transfer to other areas of publishing where institutions are prepared to pay processing fees for editorially-driven publication. He said that governments, international NGOs and other organisations may also find they could gain benefit from funding the publication of research in other fields.
‘Springer will give us a lot in terms of infrastructure at the back end and allow us to do what we presently do more efficiently. We have gained a certain amount of expertise in running an electronic publishing process with peer review and there is no reason to suppose that it is limited to publishing biomedical research,’ he concluded.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/22/2009 02:30:00 PM.
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.
