Open Access News

The team that developed BioMed Central, an open access publishing website, has launched a chemistry version called Chemistry Central.

The site will host BioMed Central’s (BMC’s) two chemistry journals: Geochemical Transactions, the online journal of the American Chemical Society’s division of geochemistry, and the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry. Chemistry-related content from BMC’s other more biological journals will also be highlighted on the site. Next year, the open access Chemistry Central Journal will also be launched and hosted by the website.

‘Chemists have really been lacking a home for open access,’ said Bryan Vickery, BMC’s deputy publisher and previously managing director of ChemWeb.com, an online chemistry portal formerly owned by Elsevier and subsequently taken over by ChemIndustry.com, based in Southern California, US. ‘Open access as a business model is relevant to all STM [science, technology and medicine] publishing,’ Vickery said....

But the Royal Society of Chemistry’s director of publishing, Peter Gregory, disagrees. ‘We have absolutely no interest shown from our editorial board members, or our authors, for open access publishing,’ he said.

Gregory believes that the open access author-pays model is ‘ethically flawed’, because it raises the risk that substandard science could be widely circulated without being subjected to more rigorous peer review. This could be particularly problematic in chemistry, where rapid, open access publication could be used to establish priority ahead of more time-consuming patent applications from rival groups, he added.

Open access publishing remains ‘financially unproven’, Gregory said: if the business model turns out to be unsustainable, parts of the scientific record may be lost when publishing platforms fold, he argues....

Comments. First note that the Royal Society of Chemistry is not connected with the Royal Society, which recently launched a hybrid OA journal program.

1. Peter Gregory doesn't understand that OA journals are peer reviewed and that their rigor can match that of the best TA journals. The old canard that journals charging author-side processing fees must compromise on peer review was never justified and overlooked the facts (1) that OA journals and TA journals might use the same standards and even the same editors and referees, (2) that editorial firewalls insulate editors from financial decisions, and (3) that fee waivers mean that some accepted articles generate no revenue.
2. Moreover, the old canard also overlooked the many reasons why subscription journals might compromise on peer review more than OA journals, for example (1) that more subscription journals charge author-side fees than OA journals; (2) that OA journals with many excellent submissions can increase their acceptance rate without lowering standards (because they have no size limits); (3) that OA journals with a dearth of excellent submissions can accept fewer papers without shortchanging subscribers (because they have no subscribers); (4) that subscription journals often justify price increases by pointing to the growing volume of published articles, creating incentives to increase the acceptance rate; (5) that OA journal fees are much closer to "subsistence-level" compensation than subscription fees, creating much smaller incentives to change editorial practices; and (6) that subscription journals with lower standards and lower rejection rates have higher profit margins (because they perform peer review fewer times per published paper).
3. Gregory also worries that if an OA journal folds, then "parts of the scientific record may be lost...." Again he's uninformed. He's criticizing BMC journals, which make a point of depositing all their OA articles in PubMed Central, an OA repository independent of BMC. It does this precisely to guarantee that its corpus will be available, and OA, in case the journal or publisher folds. Does the Royal Society of Chemistry do this? No. Moreover, BMC makes its entire corpus downloadable for anyone who wants a copy, e.g. for text mining. This has already guaranteed the proliferation of copies that protect against disaster. Does the Royal Society of Chemistry do this? No. Finally, BMC has taken steps to assure that if it is ever bought by another company, the buyer's access policies will be at least as liberal as BMC's. Has the Royal Society of Chemistry done this? No.