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Yale ends support for BioMed Central
Like many facets of open education, open access publishing is a great idea still searching for a business model. Yale’s recent announcement that it is dropping support for BioMed illustrates the point:
BioMedCentral has asked libraries for larger and larger contributions to subsidize their activities. Starting with 2005, BioMed Central article charges cost the libraries $4,658, comparable to a single biomedicine journal subscription. The cost of article charges for 2006 then jumped to $31,625. The article charges have continued to soar in 2007 with the libraries charged $29,635 through June 2007, with $34,965 in potential additional article charges in submission.
Open education endeavors have the double challenge of trying to create social benefit and develop business models in the rapidly changing web world, and clearly there are struggles ahead.
