BioMed Central Blog
BioMed Central has today submitted the following contribution to the US Office of Science and Technology Policy's Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research:
(see also OASPA's contribution, also submitted today)
BioMed Central operates a commercially viable business as an open access publisher. Under our publishing model, the costs associated with research publication are covered by open access publication fees rather than by subscription revenue. We now publish over 200 online journals operating on this model. These journals go from strength to strength, and are highly ranked by journal citation metrics such as Impact Factor. Open access journals such as Genome Biology, Malaria Journal and BMC Systems Biology, to name just a few, are among the most highly-ranked journals in their respective fields.
The success of BioMed Central’s open access journals provides important evidence that immediate open access to the official and authoritative version of published research results is not only desirable but is also achievable and sustainable.
The success of the open access model is especially notable given that, until recently, in contrast to the substantial library budgets devoted to subscriptions to serials, there has been little funding explicitly allocated by academic institutions to cover open access publication fees. Authors have therefore had to make direct use of their research grant funding in order to publish in open access journals. The Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity is an important recent initiative, involving Harvard and other leading research universities, which seeks to address this disparity by providing central institutional funding support for open access journals. This can be expected to add to the already considerable momentum driving the growth of the open access publishing model.
BioMed Central supports both the goal of open access and the goal of ensuring that the value added by publishers is properly recompensed. In contrast to some of the contributors, we do not feel there is a need to ‘balance’ these two goals as we do not feel that they are in opposition.
As noted by other participants in this debate, the benefits resulting to the scientific community from open access to research are substantial. What may be less obvious is that open access need not threaten the role of STM publishers. The open access publishing model, in which publishers are paid directly for the service of publication, is proving in practice to be just as viable a business model than as the traditional model whereby publishers recover the costs associated with publication by taking exclusive rights and then selling access via subscriptions.
Given that there is a viable business model for publishing scholarly research that does not depend on restricting access, we do not feel that the US government needs to arbitrarily limit the extent and reach of its open access deposit requirements attached to its research funding. We therefore recommend that the mandatory Public Access Policy which has operated successfully with respect to National Institutes of Health funding since 2008, be extended to cover all federally funded research. We also recommend that consideration is given, over time, to reducing or eliminating the 12 month embargo period, because this embargo period covers the very period during which the results of research are most timely and valuable. Gradual reduction of the embargo period would provide a natural mechanism to encourage publishers to adopt business models compatible with open access, while avoiding disruptive upheaval.
About BioMed Central
BioMed Central (www.biomedcentral.com) is the world’s largest open access scientific, technical, and medical (STM) publisher. All research articles published by BioMed Central are peer reviewed and are made freely and permanently accessible online upon acceptance. In 2009, biomedical scientists from across the globe submitted over 29,000 research papers to BioMed Central’s 205 journals, a 30% increase over 2008.
Research articles published in BioMed Central’s journals are universally and freely accessible via the Internet without charge or any other barrier to access; articles are immediately deposited and permanently archived in multiple international archives (including PubMed Central) and authors retain copyright of their article, which can be freely distributed and reused under a Creative Commons as long as correct attribution is given.
Like many other open access publishers, BioMed Central’s business model is based on charging for the service that we provide. An article processing charge, levied at publication, covers the cost of publishing the article, including providing editorial tools, administering the peer review process, preparing the article for publication and developing and maintaining the journal website. As can be seen from the increase of submissions to open access journals year on year, a growing number of researchers are taking advantage of the funds available from funding bodies and institutions which are set aside to pay article processing charges. BioMed Central also operates a waiver policy to ensure that article processing charges are not an obstacle to publication for authors without sufficient funding. BioMed Central is a founding member of OASPA, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, which seeks to represent the growing number of open access publishers, and to encourage best practices amongst open access publishers.
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 17:59 Comments (0)