The Croatian Medical Journal (CMJ) has recently been approached by two major [commercial, non-OA] publishing companies and offered to become one of the journals in their cluster. The five benefits offered to the journal were the following: increasing the journal’s international market presence; working with the editors-in-chief and publisher’s academic relations on the improvement of the impact factor of the journal; copyediting and typesetting via publisher’s offices; marketing for subscription and non subscription revenue and paying royalties on the revenues received by publisher to the present owner of the journal; and input marketing to attract papers....The editorial decision was to join neither of the publishers....
In a “publish online or perish” situation, it seems that an improvement would mean better “findability” of a journal. The CMJ’s online user statistics shows that, since introducing LinkOut (MEDLINEs’ method of linking to publishers Web site), there is an average of 5000 hits per month from MEDLINE to CMJ’s online full-text articles in PDF. Another 7000 visits come from Google Scholar. Higher percentage of visits from Google Scholar is recognized by other journals as well. Taking these numbers into consideration, it is plausible that the CMJ would in fact not benefit from joining a major publisher in terms of visibility, since the majority of our current readers find CMJ online from free search engines....
For at least two reasons, the CMJ has always had a mission that was beyond a simple competition for a higher impact factor. First, it is not realistically possible for a regional journal such as the CMJ to truly compete with some other journals from the field of general medicine, which have a long history of far-reaching global influence. Furthermore, the primary mission of the CMJ has always been promoting good science in Croatia and other small and emerging scientific communities....Therefore, the benefit of a larger impact factor also does not speak in favor of joining a big commercial publisher....
The CMJ is definitely a not for profit journal. The CMJ’s owners are all four Croatian medical schools, each contributing either financially and/or logistically. Major financial support is provided by the Ministry of Science, Education, and Sports. This kind of support is financially more than satisfactory and also ensures the journal’s independence....
After analyzing pros and cons for commercial publishing, we concluded that the CMJ would not benefit from such a change. Our interests are beyond making a profit and we still think that setting the standards and education are the fundamental aims of the CMJ....Therefore, we may conclude that, for the time being, there are no pressing reasons for the journal to join any big commercial publisher....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/11/2007 04:31:00 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.
