BioMed Central Changes Tack From Flat Fee
-- Library Journal, 2/23/2004
Although it initially offered institutional memberships on a flat fee basis, open access publisher BioMed Central (BMC) has told members and supporters that institutional renewals for 2005 will be calculated on an estimated "per article published" basis. Under the initial BMC model, however, APCs for those who opt for "institutional memberships" are waived in exchange for the flat rate membership fee. That means researchers at member institutions can submit and publish freely all accepted articles with BMC. Currently, the BMC web site lists U.S. flat fees ranging from $1612 to $8000. That model, however, produced "unfair side effects" earlier than anticipated, explained BioMed Central publisher Jan Velterop in a message to Yale University's Liblicense electronic discussion list. "While we started off with a flat membership fee, based on the number of potential researchers in a given institution," wrote Velterop, "some institutions generated far more articles than others."
To Scott Plutchak, director of the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, the change shows that supporting open access must be an "institutional" issue, not merely a library issue. While some think open access can save library budgets suffering from decades of serials inflation, Plutchak offers a caution: someone must pay for the costs of publishing and there is no guarantee that savings from open access will remain in library budgets. In a January editorial in the Journal of the Medical Library Association, Plutchak urged librarians to focus instead on the long term. "The more successful open access becomes, the more irrelevant our traditional view of library budgets will be," he wrote. "This is an issue of institutional economics, not library economics, and we need to engage our institutional leaders at that level if we are to continue to play our crucial role in information management."
