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Re: Does BMC's business model conflict with Editorial Independence?



The fact that the editors' original complaint seemed to be that they were not able to waive publication fees as often as they would like would seem to bear out Matt's view of their editorial integrity

Sally

Sally Morris, Chief Executive
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK
Email: sally.morris@alpsp.org

----- Original Message -----
From: <matt@biomedcentral.com>
To: <pmd8@cornell.edu>; <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, May 12, 2006 1:16 AM
Subject: RE: Does BMC's business model conflict with Editorial Independence?

Phil,

The concerns that you express ignore the core function of
journals, which is to convey an authoritative stamp of editorial
approval on research.

Neither BioMed Central's editors, nor BioMed Central, nor Public
Library of Science, nor any other open access journal publisher,
would advance their own interests by accepting articles
regardless of quality, since journals which cannot convey a
meaningful stamp of editorial approval will not attract
submissions.

To take just one example, the BioMed Central journal which
publishes the *most* articles, 'BMC Bioinformatics', also has the
highest impact factor of any BioMed Central journal. More
generally, the number of publications in each of our journals is
strongly positively correlated with impact factor.  So the idea
that somehow quality and quantity tug in opposite directions is
misguided. Having a reputation for quality attracts more papers.

Matt

The editorial remuneration practices of BMC do not give me
assurances that BMC editors are fair and honest arbitrators of their
editorial responsibilities.

--Phil Davis