Re: BMC model changes

["Matthew Cockerill" <matt@biomedcentral.com>]

Karen,

Thanks for bringing up the important issue of BioMed Central's
institutional membership scheme(s). I hope that I can clarify the
situation and provide some background.

First, I'd like to reassure you that BioMed Central's underlying model has
not changed. The model has always been that, instead of recouping costs
through subscriptions (which limit access), BioMed Central would cover its
costs through upfront charges. Article processing charges (APCs) can
either be paid by individual authors (using funds from their funder or
institution), or the costs can be covered collectively on behalf of all
authors at an institution, via an institutional membership.

Institutional membership was designed:
* to make life easier for authors
* to reduce the administrative overhead associated with APC payments for 
  institutions
* to offer institutions a discount, compared to paying each APC separately

The rates for BioMed Central's FTE-based pricing scheme for institutional
membership were based on an estimate of the number of articles that
institutions of various sizes would publish with BioMed Central. As an
initial starting point, this FTE-based model had many merits - it was a
familiar system for librarians, and since the price for the year was fixed
in advance, it was easy to incorporate into budgets. Inevitably some
institutions published more articles than the estimate, and so did better
from this scheme, while others published fewer articles and so did less
well from it, but initially the amounts concerned were small so this was
not a critical issue.

It has always been clear from first principles, though, that as more and
more articles are published in BioMed Central journals, the cost for
all-inclusive institutional membership would have to go up in proportion
to the number of articles published. Like any other publisher, when we
publish an article we incur costs for peer review, mark-up and long-term
archiving etc. Our costs are low compared to other publishers, but they
are proportional to the number of articles published. [I would agree that
this is something which BioMed Central probably could and should have
conveyed more clearly in the early days of the institutional membership
scheme.]

Due to BioMed Central's success and rapid growth in terms of number of
articles published, an institution that published 5 articles with BioMed
Central in 2001 might easily publish 50 articles in 2005. It clearly is
not viable to cover the costs of the 10-fold higher number of articles
published in 2005 with the same pricing that was used in 2001 for 5
articles.

Furthermore, there are significant disparities between the number of
articles published by different institutions of similar size. As a result,
a purely FTE-based model would run into problems, as it would then not
make economic sense for librarians whose institutions publish less
research to become members.

BioMed Central initially proposed to address this by calculating a renewal
for institutional members based on the likely number of articles that
would be published by the institution's authors the following year, based
on the institutions previous number of publications and the overall growth
rate. However, an estimation-based approach has disadvantages for both
sides. If more articles than the estimate are published, BioMed Central
could fail to cover its costs. If fewer articles than estimated are
published, the member institution might not make a saving compared to
paying individual article processing charges.

On the basis of feedback and consultation with the community (including
librarians), BioMed Central introduced the "Prepay membership" scheme:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/prepaymembership which
*guarantees* BioMed Central member institutions a significant discount on
the full Article Processing Charge, while also guaranteeing to BioMed
Central that the revenue will be in proportion to the number of articles
published.

We fully recognize, however, that many libraries have relatively static
budgets which are already overstretched by paying high prices for
traditional journal subscriptions. These libraries generally recognize
that, long term, the costs of open access publishing will be lower, but in
the short term they may not have the funds to pay the full cost of open
access publishing on behalf of their authors. Instead, they prefer authors
to pay article processing charges from their research budgets.
"Supporters' membership":
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/supportersmembership was
introduced to allow such libraries to support open access through an
affordable, FTE-based payment, which would give their authors a discount
on APCs, but would also ensure that BioMed Central received sufficient
revenue per article to cover its costs.

In terms of sustainability, it is important to bear in mind that the cost
per article of open access journals such as those from BioMed Central
tends to be significantly lower than the price that the community pays
(via subscriptions) for every article published in a traditional journal.
See for example the Wellcome Trust report:  
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTD003185.html

So, although it can certainly be a challenge to pay article costs for open
access articles whilst simultaneously paying as much as ever to subscribe
to existing journals, this is a transitional issue rather than a
reflection on the long term sustainability of the open access model. As
more and more journals become wholly or partially open access, this
transition is happening at an accelerating rate. The end result will be
that the scientific community will end up with a more efficient, more
competitive system of publishing with lower costs (and far greater access)
than the current subscription-based model. It would certainly be sadly
ironic for the scientific community to end up stuck with the current
access-restricted system of publishing because it lacks the transitional
funds to switch to a better and less expensive system. Fortunately, the
strong backing from major funders such as NIH, Wellcome, and RCUK for open
access means that that now looks like a very unlikely sce!
 nario.

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Best regards,

Matt Cockerill
== 
Matthew Cockerill, Ph.D. 
Publisher
BioMed Central  http://www.biomedcentral.com
Email: matt@biomedcentral.com 


On 7 Oct 2005, at 23:37, ALBERT@hslc.org wrote:

> Has anyone noticed that BMC no longer offers an institutional membership
> that picks up the article processing fees for authors from that
> institution? They are mimicking more of a PLoS model, by offering
> supporting memberships that provide a 15% discount on author fees or a
> pre-paid membership that includes processing fees paid up front (which
> slightly higher discounts, I think) and deducted as they are assessed
> throughout the year. I believe this speaks volumes about the question of
> the original model's economic sustainability.  In other words, BMC's
> original fee plan did not provide sufficient funds for handling the
> necessary peer review and publication costs. What do others think?  The
> new membership plans are described here:
> http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/membership
>
> (I did just notice that new members can join through the end of the
> year, using the old institutional membership model- but existing members
> must renew using one of the new plans).
>
> Karen Albert, MLS, AHIP
> Director of Library Services
> Fox Chase Cancer Center
> Phila., PA 19111
> albert@hslc.org