Open Access News

The US National Institute of Health (NIH) has long been at the forefront of the Open Access (OA) initiative for scientific and medical research. Researchers who benefit from NIH funding are strongly encouraged to submit published research articles to the NIH's Open Access website PubMed Central, where material is made freely available to other researchers and to the general public. Now The Wellcome Trust, the largest private funder of medical research in the UK has also adopted an OA policy. But unlike the NIH's policy, Wellcome have made it a condition that those who receive its funding must allow their results to be placed on the PubMed Central OA repository....

In October this year a survey carried out by CIBER, an independent publishing think tank, suggested that OA publishing is on the increase. The survey revealed a dramatic rise in the number of authors publishing in OA journals. Twenty nine percent of authors questioned said they'd published in an OA journal compared to only 11 percent the previous year. Ian Rowlands and Dave Nicholas, the authors of the report, said "The research community is now much more aware of the OA issue. There has been a large rise in authors knowing quite a lot about OA (up 10 percent from the 2004 figure) and a big fall in authors knowing nothing at all about open access (down 25 percent)."...However some leading lights in the publishing community are questioning OA publishing's viability. In a report named The Facts About Open Access, backed by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Stanford University's HighWire Press, it was found that 41 percent of OA journals are losing money, 24 percent are breaking even and only 35 percent are in profit. Bob Campbell, president of Blackwell Publishing, said the survey showed that the long-term viability of OA publishing was highly questionable. "Most OA publishing houses are financially stretched," he said. "The OA model is not secure financially, it isn't delivering a stable platform and I don't think it's sustainable."....However, Dr Matthew Cockerill of UK based OA publisher BioMed Central (BMC), said it was too early to make judgments about OA: "The fact that many OA journals currently operate at a loss is simply a sign that these are early days. There is every reason to think that the passage of time will profoundly improve the ability of OA journals to cover their costs." He said that BMC's manuscript submissions were up 56 percent on the previous year....

DCL's vice president, David Skurnik, says that it is no accident that some OA Publishers are profitable. "If the Web is the only destination for these articles, we have found that the average Publisher cost per article from the point of manuscript submission to Web Publication to be just under $50. This includes the cost of tracking, conversion, QA and uploading. With time, I expect that number to go down even further. The following estimate is from customers who have no control over the manuscripts they receive. Those Publishers who are successfully utilizing technology to standardize manuscript submissions will experience even greater cost reductions since consistently structured manuscripts are easier to convert."