As one journal ends open-access policy, a new one embraces it

As the British Medical Journal was announcing in early August that its free online-access policy will end in 2005 (CMAJ 2003;169[6]:590), a journal built entirely upon the open-access concept was preparing for launch in the US. The Public Library of Science (PLoS), a nonprofit organization committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a free public resource, is launching PLoS Biology on Oct. 13; PloS Medicine will follow next year (www.publiclibraryofscience.org/). PLoS Executive Director Vivian Siegel says that although the monthly peer-reviewed journals will provide their online content for free, researchers' funding organizations will have to pay US$1500 in order for the work to be published.

Siegel, a former editor of Cell, says access to research is an integral part of the publishing process. “Publishing is the last step in your research. It ensures that others can learn and build on what you've found, and it is the reason you were funded in the first place.” She also says there is an ethical duty to make publicly funded research freely accessible to the taxpayers who paid for it. If researchers can't afford the fee, it may be waived.

She says PLoS has a US$9-million start-up grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation that “will allow us to demonstrate this will work.” Advertising may be taken later, but “the fees are a main source of revenue.”

The question is, will they cover costs? CMAJ, for example, spends about Can$5000 (US$3500) to process and edit each research-based manuscript.

The editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association says the open-access model “is not feasible for the average general clinical journal.” Dr. Catherine De Angelis says specialists such as geneticists who publish in narrow-interest specialty journals don't require the same degree of editing as researchers writing in a general medical journal, which must communicate to a broader audience. The differences between specialty and general clinical journals are “like the difference between a banana and a cabbage — they have no concept of what clinical medicine is.”

Although JAMA is a not-for-profit publication, it needs revenue from advertising to pay for the intensive publishing process, which includes peer review, statistical review, editing, formatting and publication. Its abstracts and lead articles are available free online, and information is provided to journalists.“We are meeting the needs of people,” says De Angelis.

There are about 300 open-access journals worldwide (www.doaj.org). BioMed Central (BMC, www.biomedcentral.com) publishes 58 of them in subject areas ranging from bioinformatics to nursing. BMC articles are peer reviewed, but they are not edited as extensively as papers in most quality print journals. It also charges researchers US$500 for publication. — Barbara Sibbald, CMAJ