Open Access News

Springer Science+Business Media (Springer) has announced the acquisition of the Current Medicine Group (CMG) from entrepreneur and open-access advocate Vitek Tracz....Perhaps the significant point here is that users of CMG's information pay nothing to gain access to it. As open-access advocates, and increasingly research funders, continue to demand that research articles be made freely available on the Web, sponsored publishing will surely seem like an attractive alternative model to a company like Springer. Certainly, with its profits currently heavily reliant on selling subscriptions to peer-reviewed journals, its traditional business is looking more and more vulnerable. The obvious solution to this threat, of course, is to embrace open access (OA), and adopt the OA author-pays model, where researchers (or, in most cases, their funders) pay to publish articles, which are then made freely available on the Web....Nevertheless, clearly conscious of the shifting sands, last year Springer launched its own open-access option Open Choice. This allows authors to elect to pay $3,000 to publish in Springer journals, on the basis that their paper will then be made freely available on the Web. And as a further concession to OA, this August Haank appointed former BioMed Central publisher Jan Velterop as director of open access at the company. Velterop's job is to make sure that "open access gets the required attention both internally and externally” It must be doubted, however, that Haank's sceptical views on OA, expressed to me in 2004, have changed significantly. As he put it then, "I remain sceptical about people's ability to undertake the massive redirection of money flows — both within each single institution, and within every country — that open access requires." The problem is, however, that the world is moving rapidly to the point where it will not be possible for publishers to charge people to access primary research information. To continue in business, therefore, commercial publishers will need to find alternatives to the profitable subscription-based publishing model they have long enjoyed. In this light, CMG's sponsored publishing model is likely to have proven intriguing to Springer, not least because if applied to peer-reviewed journals it could avoid the "massive redirection of money flows" within research institutions that Haank referred to, and yet still deliver OA. Whether the model can be adapted to peer-reviewed literature is not clear. But publishers face little choice but to explore all the options. Indeed, one might ask: "Since corporations are sponsoring more and more of the research conducted in universities, why should they not also sponsor peer-reviewed journals?" Likewise, if IBM can donate patents to further the cause of the open source movement, why should not companies help facilitate open access? If such questions haven’t already occurred to Springer, once it has had a chance to examine CMG's business model in more detail they surely will. It is worth noting, after all, that PLoS has itself begun seeking sponsorship, although as a not-for-profit organisation it clearly has an advantage over commercial publishers when seeking financial support. The challenge for publishers would lie in convincing potential sponsors that there was sufficient value to them in sponsoring an open-access journal. The likelihood is, of course, that a successful long-term OA model would include a range of different financial models....For Tracz, presumably, the sale of CMG provides vital new funding to enable him to continue the OA experiment he began when he launched BMC five years ago. As has been said elsewhere, OA is inevitable. Publishers, therefore, must now find ways of making it work, or get out of the the academic journal publishing business.