BioMed Central Changes Tack

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 BMC's open access model, access to all content, including databases, archives, and peer-reviewed journals, is free for users. Costs are instead recouped through author processing charges (APCs). 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 $1,612 to $8000.

That model, however, produced "unfair side effects" earlier than anticipated, explained BMC 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."

As such, for 2005, BMC announced it would "link fees to the past record of publication as a proxy." Should researchers at a member institution publish ten articles during their 2005 membership, their membership bill would be the number of articles (ten) multiplied by the APC ($525) for a base fee of $5250. That figure could be adjusted downward by additional qualifying discounts. The new scheme will only apply for renewals.

While it was hardly a surprise that BMC may have needed to adjust its business model, it was surprising, noted Cornell University librarian Phil Davis, that news of the change "broke" on Liblicense. "I think Jan Velterop was not on the same page as the rest of his marketing group, and his postings created a flurry of policy actions from the company…. I think BMC is trying to figure their model out as they go along."

"One of the chief problems with the current or traditional subscription model is that authors are completely desensitized to the cost of publishing," Davis explained. With the BMC change for 2005, "moving to an institutional membership is no different in that we will keep the author removed from the price…. It is potentially a suicidal model in terms of our budget."

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 American Medical 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."