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

[Eric Hellman <eric@openly.com>]

Any electronic publishing venture is likely to have a significant
fixed-cost investment in technology and infrastructure. To the extent that
this investment is amortized over larger numbers of journals and papers,
profit will increase with maturity.

It is certainly true that open-access business models will require greater
discipline in controlling per-article costs. In the long term, such
discipline is likely to be an great strategic advantage for any publisher,
no matter what the business model!

Eric

> 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