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

Thanks for this. I have asked our researchers to comment on the
statistics relating to the two large OA publishers included in the
figures, as I do not have access to the confidential data provided

Matt may be right that the finances of OA journals will improve over time. I'm not surprised that their income is trending up - more articles means
more income. However, this doesn't necessarily mean more profit. It
seems logical to me that a model based on per-article charges is less
likely to improve its finances than one based on subscriptions/licences. As a journal matures, it attracts more and better articles; under the OA
model, this simply increases costs (and if the rejection rate goes up,
costs per published article go up even more steeply). Revenue can only
keep pace with the number of published articles, unless a significant
increase in publication charges is possible (are authors monitoring
steeper-than-RPI increases in such charges, I wonder?!). Under the
subscription/licensing model, on the other hand, the potential growth is
very much larger and steeper than that in content.

However, this is surmise - time will tell

Sally Morris, Chief Executive
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
Email: sally.morris@alpsp.org

----- Original Message ----- From: "Grace Baynes" <Grace@biomedcentral.com>
Sent: Saturday, October 15, 2005 12:48 AM
Subject: BioMed Central responds to ALPSP's study 'The Facts about Open Access'

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

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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