Re: BioMed Central/SPARC Press release

[Fred Friend <ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk>]

Anthony Watkinson is right in that any enterprise needs a certain level of
scale in order to work. All the signs are that BMC will achieve a large
number of authors and users but their model is very different from the Big
Deal offered by commercial publishers, if only because it does not have a
big price attached!

Indeed the importance of the BMC model is that it shifts the emphasis in
journal publishing away from price to cost-plus. Anthony's contacts may or
may not be right that the current level of author charges (not only BMC's
estimate, by the way) will enable a publisher to flourish, but the
principle of use of cost plus investment in the future plus reasonable
profit is important. If the BMC cost-plus calculation is proved not to be
viable it can be revised, but this model allows the person making the
payment to see the relationship between cost and price in a way that the
current model does not. Commercial confidentiality will have to be
respected, but as more journals move to front-end economic models it will
be clearer why one journal publisher charges one price and another journal
publisher a higher price. There is room in this model for variations in
price from journal to journal if the costs - eg. the start-up marketing
costs for a new journal - are higher.

There is no reason why this principle should not be used by smaller
publishers. They may not be able to achieve economies of scale but equally
they may not have the historic legacy of high costs or expectations of
high profits.

Fred Friend

At 10:44 18/05/02 EDT, you wrote:
>Who cannot fail to be impressed by the way BioMed Central is handling its
>enterprise? Mr. Tracz is a truly innovative publisher. In some circles it
>is axiomatic that commercial enterprises cannot innovate, but in the STM
>area much innovation has come from commercial houses, including Elsevier
>e.g. the Trends journals.
>
>My reading of this is as follows. Every learned society, with whom I have
>spoken, agrees that the fee to acepted authors is too low to be viable.
>Private conversations with BMC staff suggests that the enterprise will
>work if and only if they achieve a really huge throughput of papers
>leading to economies of scale kicking in and (crucially) advertising and
>sponsorship revenue flowing in because of the numbers visiting the site. I
>would be interested to learn if this understanding is incorrect.
>
>The problem, as I see it, is that we are again producing models like the
>Big Deal (remember a joint invention of librarians and publishers), which
>is for the big players. If is difficult for smaller players to get
>together to produce an offering of real interest to library consortia.
>With the exception of BioOne I cannot think of any such collaboration.
>
>In the Open Access case, the smaller players e.g. those supported by SPARC
>need to charge more to authors and even then lose money. They will not be
>able to get the economies of scale and unless they are in biomedicine they
>will not get advertising support even if they got the critical mass.
>
>This is a concise view. It is offered tentatively. Is it wrong?
>
>Anthony Watkinson