For several years I've been involved with the open access journal Biomedical Digital Libraries, first as an Associate Editor and now as Editor. Since its founding in 2004 BDL has been published by BioMed Central (BMC).
When we started librarians enjoyed deep discounts on author fees, or often paid nothing at all to publish. At the time many academic institutions were members of BioMed Central; the prime membership benefit was a reduction in author fees.
In the intervening years BMC's membership packages have become quite expensive. Libraries have responded by dropping memberships, or by purchasing memberships that provide for a much more modest reduction in author fees. These days it's not uncommon for an individual paper to cost at least $1,000 to publish.
For an author with a major grant--who has chosen to allocate some publication funds--this is not a problem. But for librarians, who generally have no publication funds at their disposal, this is a showstopper. I can waive the publication fees for a certain number of articles, but I maxed out that ability early this year. After that point we had to pay our own freight with BMC, and our author base was not in a position to help us do this.
After concluding that our relationship with BMC was untenable, BDL amicably severed our ties. All content published to date will be preserved and accessible.
We're now in the process of transferring publication to Open Journal Systems, a move that will allow us to abandon author fees. My goal is to have us up and running in January. This move will shift the burden for managing editorial functions squarely on us--BMC won't be there to assist us any more. If the no-fee policy proves successful (just as BDL was successful in its early years, when we effectively had no author fees because of institutional subscriptions), BDL will be back in business.
Time will tell if the author fee was the only barrier to publication. Another change between 2004 and 2007 is that library blogging has become routine. (I'm blogging about a library topic right now, in fact.) The formality and rigor of peer review is not as central to a librarian's professional advancement as it is in other fields, but this doesn't mean that the flow of ideas isn't critical to us. So over time the "biblioblogosphere" may supplant formally published papers as the means of sharing ideas, research, and insights among librarians. Eric Schnell sees the potential for this, and has promoted the concept of a "blog citation index."
Only time will tell what happens with BDL. In the meantime, our impending move to OJS is causing some ripples in blog-land. Eric blogged about it, generating a question from Charles Bailey about why BMC's waiver policies were not sufficient for our needs (I hope I've answered your question, Charles.) Then Peter Suber shared the news about our decision not to charge author fees, and by now readers in Japan also know the latest. And all of this after I merely wrote a short email to the BDL editorial team (Eric's a member) explaining the news.
I'm glad to hear this. I was always sceptical of the ability of BDL to sustain the transaction fee model, given the relative paucity of grant funding in librarianship. I'm familiar with OJS through my participation on the board of Evidence Based Library and Information Practice and have been very impressed with it. In fact, I've recommended it to MLA as a platform for managing the JMLA.
Posted by: T Scott | December 17, 2007 at 07:33 AM