BioMed Central responds to ALPSP's study 'The Facts about Open Access'

["Grace Baynes" <Grace@biomedcentral.com>]

*Apologies for cross posting*

We hope that this will be of interest to the list. Any questions or
comments, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Grace Baynes (grace@biomedcentral.com)
BioMed Central


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BioMed Central responds to ALPSP's study 'The Facts about Open Access'
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BioMed Central welcomes objective research into open access publishing.
Unfortunately, however, the report published by ALPSP this week ("The
Facts about Open Access") contains significant factual inaccuracies.  We
also disagree with many of the reports interpretations and conclusions.
The two most serious problems with the report are that it inaccurately
describes the peer review process operated by BioMed Central's journals,
and it also draws unjustified conclusions concerning the long-term
sustainability of open access journals.

The overview of the report incorrectly states that BioMed Central does not
operate external peer review on most of its journals. In fact, all of
BioMed Central's journals operate full peer review using external peer
reviewers. Full peer review is a condition of the inclusion of articles in
NIH's PubMed Central, in which all 140+ of the journals published by
BioMed Central are archived.

The study groups BioMed Central together with Internet Scientific
Publications (ISP) as a cohort, and indicates that this was done because
over half of the responding open access journals were from these two
publishers. ISP and BioMed Central have little in common as publishers,
and so the conclusions drawn about BioMed Central by looking at this
cohort are not meaningful and are often misleading. For example, the
BioMed Central/ISP group of journals is reported to offer online
manuscript submission on a lower percentage of journals than other journal
groups. The report picks up on this as a surprising finding, suggesting
implicitly that open access journals are lagging behind in this regard. In
fact, BioMed Central offers online submission of manuscripts on every one
of its journals. Not only that, but BioMed Central's manuscript submission
system is widely praised by authors, many of whom tell us that it is the
best online submission system they have used.

ALPSP Chief Executive Sally Morris comments in her introduction to the
report that "Over 40% of the Open Access journals are not yet covering
their costs and, unlike subscription journals, there is no reason why the
passage of time - evidenced in increasing submissions, quality or impact -
should actually change that". She goes on to suggest that this calls into
question the sustainability of the open access publishing model. The
suggestion that the economics of open access journals are unlikely to
improve over time is not supported by the evidence in the report, and runs
strongly counter to BioMed Central's direct experience.

According to BioMed Central Publisher, Dr Matthew Cockerill,

"The fact that many open access journals currently operate at a loss is
simply a sign that these are early days.  There is every reason to think
that the passage of time will profoundly improve the ability of open
access journals to cover their costs.

Between September 2004 and September 2005, for example, the journal BMC
Bioinformatics almost trebled the number of submissions it received. It
also increased its article processing charge during that same time period.
Both factors have helped move BioMed Central much closer to overall
profitability, and this progress is continuing."

Further evidence for a promising future for open access journals is given
in the study's findings on revenue expectations and trends. 92% of open
access journals were meeting or exceeding revenue expectations, in
comparison to 91% of AAMC journals, 83% of ALPSP journals and 76% of
surveyed HighWire journals. Similarly, the study finds that revenues from
the last fiscal year to the current fiscal year are "trending upward" for
71% of 209 surveyed open-access journals, compared to between 27% and 67%
of subscription-based publishers that were surveyed.

Dr Cockerill continues,

"To try to determine whether an entire model is 'sustainable' based on
asking individual publishers operating in today's environment if they are
making money is to miss the wood for the trees. You have to step back and
look at the big picture. The big picture is that open access offers the
research community a far better deal than the traditional model.

Scholarly publishing is viable only because it is paid for and supported
by the research community, out of the funding (often public funding) which
that community receives. Whether a model is financially viable comes down,
in the long run, to a couple of simple questions: Can the community afford
the overall costs, and is the service provided worth the money?

In terms of open access, the answer to these questions is increasingly
clear. Wellcome is the UK's largest biomedical research charity, spending
�400 million a year. The work it funds results in around 3,500 articles
being published each year. Wellcome's research predicts that the overall
cost to the science community of OA publishing will be, if anything,
significantly less than the costs of the current publishing model. If the
open access model can deliver greater access to research, at a lower cost
to funders than the existing model, then it is clearly sustainable."

ENDS

For more information or to arrange an interview, contact:

Grace Baynes, BioMed Central
Tel: +44 (0)20 7631 9988
E-mail: press@biomedcentral.com

About BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com/)
BioMed Central, part of Current Science Group, is an independent online publishing house committed to providing open access to peer-reviewed research. This commitment is based on the view that immediate free access to research and the ability to freely archive and reuse published information is essential to the rapid and efficient communication of science. 

Further information

ALPSP study
'The Facts about Open Access': http://www.alpsp.org/pubs.htm

Wellcome Trust:

Report 'An Economic Analysis of Scientific Research Publishing':
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTD003181.html
Wellcome Trust open access policy information:
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTX026830.html

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