August 10, 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
Posted on Friday August 10, 2007 | Permalink |Comments
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The cost of publishing both hard copy and online journals has skyrocketed over the past several years. Fees paid only cover a fraction of the cost in publishing articles that are distributed nationally and world-wide. Preparing manuscripts for publication along with the guiding them through the refereeing process is expensive. Because the readership in many professional journals is limited as compared to the commercial market, fees to assist in publishing articles should be supported in higher education.
William Allan Kritsonis, PhD
Professor
PhD Program in Educational Leadership
Prairie View A&M University
Member of the Texas A&M University System
Editor-in-Chief
NATIONAL FORUM JOURNALS
(Since 1983)
www.nationalforum.com
— William Allan Kritsonis, PhD Aug 10, 09:32 PM #
I’m not in a position to criticize another library’s decision to not continue their BioMed Central institutional membership. Health Sciences Libraries are almost always having to juggle competing spending priorities with limited resources. BioMed Central does offer an alternative to the pre-paid institutional membership that Yale discontinued. A Supporting Institutional Membership still gives all the membership benefits of a pre-paid membership, with the exception that authors are given a 15% discount off their article processing charges. This membership gives libraries a reasonable fixed cost, and creates a partnership between authors and libraries for the funding of open access publications. At the University of Virginia, this approach worked very well in its first year, which we have just completed.
Jonathan Lord, MLS
Collection Development Librarian
University of Virginia Health Sciences Library
— Jonathan Lord Sep 21, 08:58 AM #