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"Author pays" may be the new science publishing modelVaccination News Home Page subscribe Vaccination NewsLetter http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7382/182/b?etoc
News roundup
"Author pays" may be the new science publishing modelTony Delamothe BMJ
A consensus is emerging on how the internet will change the economics of scientific publishing. In future, authors are likely to be asked to pay journals the costs of publishing their original research articles online, and journals will make these articles freely available to all from the moment of publication. The need to take out subscriptions to access electronic versions of original research will disappear. This was the message at last week’s advisory committee meeting of PubMed Central, the National Institutes of Health’s initiative to free up access to reports of original research in the life sciences. Electronic journals such as the New Journal of Physics and 90 of the journals published by BioMed Central, have already adopted the model of "author pays," and there are plans for more to do the same. The Public Library of Science, a pressure group of scientists committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource, will be publishing two new journal devoted to life sciences and medicine on this basis (4 January, p 11). The hope is that agencies funding the original research will agree to foot the authors’ bill—in most cases a small fraction of the overall costs of the research. Major funding agencies—such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the United States and the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom—have indicated their willingness to do so. They want the research that they have funded to receive the widest possible exposure; access controls get in the way. While the Public Library of Science is setting up its new journals out of exasperation over many traditional journals’ refusal to free up access, some journal editors are seeking change from within. Senior executive editor of Nucleic Acids Research and Nobel laureate, Richard Roberts, has convinced his publisher, Oxford University Press (OUP), to experiment with the new model. If successful, it could be extended to other OUP publications. PubMed Central has identified mobilising senior scientists on journals’ editorial boards as one of its next big priorities. It is also attempting to accelerate the transition to the new model by offering to scan journals back to their first issue, in return for permanent rights to archive and freely distribute the scanned material. By preserving digital data, and maintaining accessibility as formats change over time, PubMed Central is freeing authors, publishers, and librarians of their anxieties over long term access to journals’ electronic archives. Scanning of the backruns of 52 journals—including 30 published by the BMJ Publishing Group—is currently under way. Of some consolation to traditional publishers may be the fact that the "author pays" model relates solely to the electronic versions of original research articles. It doesn’t affect journal publishers’ ability to charge for value added content online, such as editorials and commentaries, or to charge for subscriptions to paper journals. Competing interest: Tony Delamothe is a member of the
advisory committee of PubMed Central. The traditional publishing model generates
substantial revenues for his employer, the BMJ Publishing Group. Rapid responses:Read all Rapid responses
Other related articles in BMJ:
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 "A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth." -- Albert Einstein, letter to a friend, 1901 "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education." -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to William C. Jarvis, September 28, 1820 "What's the point of vaccination if it doesn't protect you from the unvaccinated?" -- Sandy Gottstein "Who gets to decide what the greater good is and how many will be sacrificed to it?" -- Sandy Gottstein |
