Do open access (OA) membership fees save institutions money? In the case of Columbia University, the answer is clearly, “No.”
A talk titled, “Cost/Benefit Analysis of BioMed Central Membership at a Large Medical Institution,” was presented last Friday afternoon at the 2009 Charleston Conference [Charleston, S.C., November 4-7, 2009] by Susan Klimley, the Serials and Electronic Resources Librarian in the Health Sciences Library at Columbia University.
What motivated Klimley to undertake such a study was seeing her BMC membership fees rise each year by 8%, and then by 10% in 2009. Klimley’s materials budget has been flat for the last five consecutive years, and in January she was told that she needed to trim an additional 10%.
This is a familiar story for many research libraries in the United States.
Until this year, her library was paying BMC almost $10,000 as a supporter member, which entitled Columbia authors to receive a 15% discount on author processing charges (APC). ...
Klimley worked under three possible cost/benefit models where payment was attributed to the first author, last author, and corresponding author. In each of these calculations she discovered that Columbia was paying more money to BMC under their membership model than if their authors had paid full price. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 11/09/2009 07:13:00 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.
