Yale University Libraries Cancel BioMed Central Membership in the Face of Spiraling Costs

Rich Apodaca — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 08:14:00 +0000

Yale University has ended it's financial support of BioMed Central's Open Access Membership program effective July 27, 2007. Under the program, Yale libraries paid an annual fee to cover the costs of submissions by Yale authors to BioMed Central (BMC) open access journals. Yale authors can continue to submit manuscripts to BMC, but must pay for all charges themselves.

According to the August 3, 2007 statement by Yale,

... Starting with 2005, BioMed Central page charges cost the libraries $4,658, comparable to single biomedicine journal subscription. The cost of page charges for 2006 then jumped to $31,625. The page charges have continued to soar in 2007 with the libraries charged $29,635 through June 2007, with $34,965 in potential additional page charges in submission.

As we deal with unprecedented increases in electronic resources, we have had to make hard choices about which resources to keep. At this point we can no longer afford to support the BioMedCentral model.

Apparently, Yale is not alone in its decision. In a refreshing act of openness, BMC lists both current members and former members. A surprisingly large number of universities have canceled their memberships, including over 80 in the United States alone. In effect, these cancellations represent a version of the journal deadpool, but in reverse.

Cost increases pose a real threat to the viability of scientific publication. Journals rely heavily on network effects to attract readers, authors, citations, and ultimately, subscribers. A journal can remain viable for some time in the face of canceled subscriptions. But each cancellation brings a journal that much closer to destroying its network, its only real value.

Open access by itself doesn't solve scientific publishing's most serious problem - it simply changes the paths through which ever-increasing sums of money flow.

Thanks to Wendy Warr for her alert on this story posted to the CHMINF-L mailing list.

The Journal Deadpool: Failing Business Models and Sick Markets in Scientific Publishing?

Rich Apodaca — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 07:44:00 +0000

Several articles in the past few years have alluded to the ongoing cost squeeze faced by librarians maintaining scientific journal collections. Consistently we're told by those doing the buying that subscription costs have gotten way out of control. Sadly, there's only one correct response: kill subscriptions to those journals that price themselves out of the marketplace.

For the most part, canceling journal subscriptions has been a private activity - news doesn't consistently travel beyond the confines of the institution doing it. But what if it did?

Try this thought experiment: you're a journal publisher who has had a number of canceled subscriptions in the last two years. You continue to receive a healthy number of manuscript submissions, yet your revenues have been falling to the point that you may not be able to cover your costs. Do you (a) lower subscription rates to more competitively price your product; (b) keep rates the same, hoping things will turn around; or (c) raise rates to maintain profitability?

There's an interesting hypothesis, variously alluded to, that says that journals increase their subscription rates to remain profitable in the face of declining demand. Classical economics says that declining demand should result in declining prices, but that assumes a healthy, efficiently-functioning marketplace. Scientific publishing today may not be among them.

Could declining subscription rates actually be a major cause of the "increasing costs" faced by scientific publishers and passed on to subscribers? It's a testable hypothesis if the right data have been collected.

To conduct such a study, one piece of information that may be helpful is a market-wide summary of journal subscription cancellations. Let's call it the "Journal Deadpool." Unfortunately, to my knowledge, no such data exist.

By way of the Chemical Information Sources Discussion List, Thurston Donart Miller pointed out that the Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics (PAM) Division of the Special Libraries Association has maintained a list of canceled subscriptions for the last ten years.

The PAM effort is a step in the right direction, but what if they took it further? By including data such as the date of cancellation, the last annual subscription fee, and whether an online subscription to the journal is available at the institution, a much clearer picture of the state of the scientific publishing market would emerge.

A highly-publicized, multi-institution "Journal Deadpool" would certainly give food for thought to scientists considering where to send their next manuscript. And it would strengthen the case of librarians who are caught in the middle.

One of the prerequisites for a healthy marketplace is free flow of information among both buyers and sellers. A Journal Deadpool may be just what the doctor ordered.

Image Credit: geographie

Depth-First: Tag journaldeadpool

Yale University Libraries Cancel BioMed Central Membership in the Face of Spiraling Costs

The Journal Deadpool: Failing Business Models and Sick Markets in Scientific Publishing?