BioMed Central reponds to Yale

I mentioned earlier that Yale had dropped its support for BioMed Central. BMC responds in this release on their site. Again, the discussion is mostly economic. In an absolute sense, open access may be cheaper than traditional subscription, but as the response notes, libraries can’t just move from one to the other:

…the total amount currently spent by libraries on subscriptions would be sufficient to cover the cost of peer-reviewed open access publication for all research articles. Clearly, though, libraries cannot simply transfer their acquisitions budget from subscriptions to open access overnight, since access to the subscription-only archival content currently controlled by publishers is vital for their researchers.

This doesn’t address the question of whether open access journals have sufficient heft yet to attract submissions from the top researchers in the field, which I suspect is more of what ties libraries to the traditional and prestigious subscription-based journals than archival content (though again, I’m not intimately familiar with the issues of open access, so this is a view from the outside looking in). BMC however does map out a way for universities to generate a separate funding stream for open access journals:

Biomedical research funders around the world already spend billions of dollars to support research activity. These funders are understandably concerned to ensure that the results of that research are as widely disseminated as possible so that they obtain the good value from their research expenditure. For research to be worth doing, it must be read, used and built on — open access maximizes the opportunity for such use… It is not surprising therefore, that major biomedical research funders such as NIH and HHMI now encourage open access publication, and are willing to provide financial support for it.

Encouraging research funders to support open access publication solves the acknowledged problem of generating an alternate funding stream, and it also addresses the unacknowledged issue of prestige. There are encouraging signs that at least some funders are inclined to support this approach, but as with many things in open education, this appears to be moving at the pace of cultural change. In the mean time, stop-gaps such as the institutional membership scheme that BMC has put forth will have to have sufficiently compelling value propositions to keep the ball rolling. (via Open Access News)

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 6:35 am and is filed under Open Access, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.