BioMed Central Changes Pricing

After receiving significant feedback from the academic library community, open access publisher BioMed Central (BMC) announced that it was reversing its decision to alter its institutional membership model for 2005. In early 2004, BMC announced that its institutional memberships for 2005 would be renewed calculated on an estimated "per article published" basis (see News, LJ 3/15/04, p. 17ff.).

Under the initial BMC model, institutional members paid a flat rate depending on institution size, in exchange for which researchers at member institutions had their author publication charges waived. That model, however, produced "unfair side effects," according to BMC officials, who noted that some institutions' faculty simply published more than others. Librarians, however, voiced concern over the proposed BMC plan for 2005, saying that a membership fee on a per article published basis would essentially shift the publication costs of researchers to the library—not something libraries' fixed budgets were well suited to handle.

After further consultation with its library advisory board, BMC decided not to implement the new model and to keep the 2004 model in place for 2005 while seeking "a more robust arrangement" for future years, BMC publisher Jan Velterop said. "We must achieve a workable model," Velterop added, "that takes into account the number of articles submitted and published." He said BMC hoped that librarians would help BMC get access "to the more appropriate money streams, such as grant overheads, administered by others than librarians."

Saying it is helping to meet the burgeoning demand for open access, BMC has launched a fee-based service to establish and maintain institutional repositories for colleges, universities, and research institutions. BMC officials said its Open Repository service will be based on DSpace software, the groundbreaking digital library system designed to capture, store, index, preserve, and redistribute the intellectual output of a university's research faculty in digital formats.

DSpace is freely available under an open source license and has been adopted by a number of libraries, as part of a nascent DSpace Federation. Under its program, for a fee, BMC will "build, launch, maintain, and populate" repositories for institutions that could not otherwise afford to, or may lack the infrastructure or technical capacity in-house.