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News from the open access movement


Friday, August 10, 2007

More on Yale and BMC

Andrea Gawrylewski, Yale dumps BioMed Central, The Scientist, August 9, 2007.  Excerpt:

Yale University's science and medicine libraries have decided to discontinue their membership to BioMedCentral (BMC), an open access publishing company, citing skyrocketing membership costs in a public statement issued last Friday (Aug 3)....

"The library paying for faculty publishing has not been supported by the institution, we haven't been giving additional money for this," said [Kenny Marone, director of the medical library]....

The costs of open access publishing in BMC are comparable to traditional subscriptions, Matthew Cockerill, publisher of BMC (a sister company of The Scientist) told The Scientist. But, he added, as opposed to fixed rates for subscription journals, open access publishing costs continue to rise as more authors submit their articles for publication, demanding more resources for peer review, layout, processing, and internet servers....

"We [paid for membership] initially because we did have the funds, we thought it was a good cause, and we wanted to support the content," Marone said. But with other scholarly journals increasing their publishing fees by 1000% in some cases, and a 45% increase in their bill for the electronic journal database EBSCO, the membership became unsustainable, she added...."The impact factor for some of the journals in BMC is not as high as for Nature or JAMA or The New England Journal of Medicine, and of course that always figures into decisions," Marone said....

Yale is one of 16 institutions whose BMC memberships have not been renewed thus far in 2007, leaving 107 member institutions in the US, and 209 international members....

"The fact that Yale dropped its membership does mean that other institutions might do so as well," Peter Suber, director of the Open Access Project at Public Knowledge, a public-interest advocacy group, told The Scientist in an Email. Even so, "institutional memberships make good sense for both open access publishers and universities," he added, "and I believe that BMC will continue to revise its terms to keep the program attractive to universities." ...

The bioscience library at the University of California, Berkeley, will also not be changing its BMC membership status, Beth Weil, director of the bioscience library, told The Scientist. Berkeley libraries pay a flat fee for BMC membership and encourage research funders to pick up the publication costs, while keeping a close eye on citation rates in all of their journals. "Most of the high impact, society journals do have charges, and they can be substantially more than BioMedCentral," Weil said. Dropping their membership was "a decision that Yale made, and that's fine, but I don't think it's one of those things that's going to ricochet around the library world." ...

Yale's decision is part of the growing pains associated with the transition from the traditional publishing funding model to an open access funding model, said Cockerill. "That transition is made difficult by the fact that library budgets are already tied, subscriptions have a lock in." ...