August 9, 2007

Yale Libraries Pull Out of BioMed Central Over Cost of Publication

Citing rapidly rising costs, the science and medical libraries of Yale University are stopping paying for faculty members’ articles to be published by BioMed Central, one of the two largest open-access publishers. (The university is keeping its membership in the Public Library of Science, the other well-known open-access publisher.)

The libraries paid BioMed Central less than $4,700 in 2005, but in 2006 had to pay $31,625, to publish articles in the journals, which are all freely available online. “This experiment in open-access publishing has proved unsustainable,” wrote Ann Okerson, R. Kenny Marone, and David Stern, of the Yale libraries.

The publisher responded to last week’s announcement on Tuesday in a blog post. “An increase in the number of open-access articles being submitted and going on to be published does lead to an increase in the total cost of the open-access publishing service provided by BioMed Central, but the cost per article published in BioMed Central’s journals represents excellent value compared to other publishers,” wrote Matthew Cockerill, BioMed Central’s publisher. He also noted that other ways to pay for open-access publishing exist, including having authors pay the fee out of their own grant funds.

Fifteen other American institutions have canceled their memberships in BioMed Central this year, leaving 107 members in the United States.

Beth Weil, director of the bioscience library at the University of California at Berkeley, told The Scientist that her library would keep its membership and said, about Yale’s move: “I don’t think it’s one of those things that’s going to ricochet around the library world.” —Lila Guterman

Comments

1. Maybe the name of the publisher “BioMed Central” has something to do with it. It’s got an old fashion ring to it, kinda like “Journal Junction.” Soooooo very 90’s. How about “Intellectual Edge” or “Extreme Digitization”? Think Yale might go for that?

   — marci    Aug 9, 06:11 PM    #

2. the underlying question, of course, is what is the relationship between paying and getting published. then, per force, what is the intellectual currency in publishing in a journal that requires such high payment (=peer review?) vis-à-vis promotion and tenure?

   — anthony    Aug 9, 08:46 PM    #

3. Publication in Bio-Med Central is just as regarded as most other good to high impact journals. The fact that the library is paying is very interesting. Most grants (especially the NIH kind likely funding research at Yale) have line items to cover the cost of publication. Now with the NIH going to mandate that articles be freely available to the public after one year the use of BMC and PLoS should greatly increase since they have developed the infrastructure to properly catalog and host this type of information.

   — Craig    Aug 10, 07:23 AM    #

4. The Yale offer to foot the bill for publishing was generous. It seems that they could not sustain huge variations in the costs of supporting an author’s publishing efforts. How can you plan for an unknown budget expenditure amount? Why should the library support having someone’s articles being published in BMC? Seems to me like folks with grants ought to fund their own efforts to publish, not the library.

   — jeff    Aug 10, 09:17 AM    #

5. What Craig says is quite correct regarding US gov’t funded research. That still leaves a very sustantial body of work either privately funded or funded by other governments. Under the best of circumstances either service will still be only a partial representation of meaningful research.

   — Rob    Aug 10, 09:26 AM    #

6. Very few libraries help cover the cost of publishing – why should Yale be any different? My former institution (a Big Ten School) stopped supporting author-supported publication in the BMC journals several years ago.

   The cost of publishing in BMC journals is very reasonable; the peer review process is just as good if not better than many standard journals in part because they are trying harder to prove the model works.

   In contrast, I’ve found the cost of publishing in mainstream, non-profit journals to be entirely unsustainable – I recently paid over $6000 for page charges for a single article in a society journal.

   — Stephen Ekker    Aug 10, 10:27 AM    #

Previous: Merger Talks Resume Between NYU and Polytechnic U.
Next: NCAA Closes Door to Division I, Keeps Proposed Ban on Text Messaging