Open Access News

BMJ Journals, a division of the BMJ Group, today announced the launch of a new open access service, which, if supported by authors, will make some of the important medical research being published today freely available to anyone in the world with an internet connection.

Unlocked is a new service that gives authors the option to make their articles freely available online for a fee. Unlocked is available to any author publishing an article in a BMJ Journals specialty journal. This includes some of the world's pre-eminent medical titles including: Gut, Heart, Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, Archives of Disease in Childhood, Thorax and Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.

"Getting important new medical research findings into circulation as quickly and as widely as possible is becoming increasingly critical" commented Alex Williamson, Publishing Director of BMJ Journals. "Medical research can help save lives. It's our responsibility as a leading international medical publisher to find new ways of making the research we publish available to the widest possible audience."

The open access movement has gained a strong following in the bioscience community, but it is perhaps clinical medicine where free access to research results could potentially have huge relevance to a large and public audience.

"The BMJ Group was one of the early pioneers of open access," Alex said. "Research articles published online in BMJ [one of the world's most widely read and cited general medical journals] have always been freely available - before anyone even thought of the term open access. We saw the potential of the internet to bring great improvements to medical practice through better access to information early on and we continue to strive to find ways to exploit this potential for all our benefit."

"Our recent trial offer of the Unlocked service for the Journal of Medical Genetics has clearly shown that some of our authors support open access." Alex continued. "By introducing Unlocked more widely across all our journals we can increase our experience of author pays models and can see whether open access can become a truly viable long term alternative to the subscription model."

A particular feature of Unlocked is its two-tier fee system (either £1,200/$2,220/€1,775 or £1,700/$3,145/€2,515 depending on which BMJ journal an author submits their article to), which is designed to offer authors publishing in smaller specialist journals a reduced charge....

In further support of this new policy, BMJ Journals have also announced today that authors will now be permitted to deposit their version of an article in their institutions’ or a subject based repository immediately on acceptance, subject to a six month embargo from the date of print publication before making it free to all. Authors participating in Unlocked are able to immediately place the full version of their article in the depositories of their choice, and BMJ Journals will deposit all Unlocked articles in PubMed Central immediately on publication....

Comments.

1. This is a welcome step. It's even more welcome than the hybrid programs from Elsevier and the Royal Society because BMJ's publication fees are lower and it will deposit all the Unlocked articles in an independent repository.
2. I can't yet find a page on Unlocked at the BMJ site. So I can't yet answer my remaining questions: Will BMJ let Unlocked authors retain copyright? Will it reduce subscription prices in proportion to author uptake?
3. Unlocked has been under trial at the Journal of Medical Genetics, but the JMG web site doesn't answer these questions either. The fullest account before today's announcement was an editorial by Eamonn R. Maher in JMG vol. 42 (2005) p. 97. The editorial says that BMJ will compare OA and non-OA articles on their downloads and citations. In light of the result, it appears that BMJ discovered an OA impact advantage.
4. The BMJ Group was a green publisher before this announcement and it's still green now. But I believe that it formerly allowed author self-archiving without an embargo. Because it now imposes an embargo on all who don't pay publication fees, it has retreated from its earlier position. It's too early to tell the net effect on OA. But if the rate of author uptake is low, then the new policy could do more harm than good. The same is true at other publishers shifting to hybrid models, but many of them have still not clarified the effect of the hybrid program on the self-archiving policy.
5. I appreciate that BMJ allows immediate deposit of non-Unlocked articles in OA repositories, even if it embargoes their release to OA. The very desirable dual deposit/release strategy normally applies only to OA mandates (from funders or universities), but BMJ is coming almost as close as it can as a publisher. The only way it could come closer is to make clear that it allows immediate release of OA metadata, even if it doesn't allow immediate release of OA full-texts.
6. As the announcement says, BMJ is a pioneer in OA. Because BMJ has supported OA when it could, and never lobbied against it, it doesn't have embarrassing anti-OA arguments to retract or customer cognitive dissonace to overcome.

Update (October 1, 2006). BMJ has responded to my comments, making clear that authors do retain copyright and that BMJ will reduce its subscription prices in proportion to author uptake. BMJ itself still allows no-embargo self-archiving, even for authors who don't choose the Unlocked option, but the BMJ specialty journals only permit no-embargo self-archiving for authors who pay the Unlocked fee.