RE: BiomedCentral Revised Institutional Membership Model

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

I agree with Fytton. The various proposals and combinations in the OA
arena have gotten altogether too complicated, and are beginning to
resemble the subscription schemes of some of the larger commercial
publishers;). I have supported BMC from the first--I think, though, that
it has now shown by experience that this particular combination won't
work.. For this particular aspect to not work out should not be taken as a
criticism, but as a positive step towards finding the best model with
which to go forwards. This is unexplored territory, and we have only
ongoing experience as our guide

David Goodman
LIU school of Library and Information Science
dgoodman@liu.edu

-----Original Message-----
From:	Fytton Rowland [mailto:J.F.Rowland@lboro.ac.uk]
Sent:	Sun 2/15/2004 9:08 PM
To:	liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: BiomedCentral Revised Institutional Membership Model

It seems to me that this message from Rebecca Stuhr illustrates nicely the
confusion that BMC has (with the very best of intentions) created by the
introduction of its membership scheme.  Their original model - Article
Processing Charges - was a simple and clear Open Access (OA) model, and
could be quite easily distinguished from a traditional toll-access (TA)
model.  As Stuhr's message makes clear, many institutions are expecting
the BMC membership fee to be paid from *library* funds, not the funds of
academic departments or research grants, which leads to people thinking
that BMC's OA model is no different from a TA model.

It is probably too late to remove the confusion now, though BMC are
clearly trying to rescue the situation.  It is a shame that the waters got
muddied in the first place.  Sadly, this may have set back the OA cause.

Fytton Rowland, Loughborough University