[GOAL] Re: The dramatic growth of BioMedCentral's open access article processing charges

Mon Mar 3 08:24:32 GMT 2014

Dear all,

I completely agree with Bo-Christer, but I want to adress another 
problem with BMC. As far as I can see it - please correct me if I´m 
wrong - BMC does not mark rejected submission  as such. If you have an 
institutional membership in order to  to get a lean workflow for your 
authors and your library staff and to get some discount per article, you 
have to pay top-ups, which are calculated on the total number of open 
submissions. So BMC has no interest to mark rejected submissions and in 
addition to that, we get the feedback from our authors, that the time 
for the peer review process increased considerably over the last years.

So I do have a problem with rising prices, when the product is getting 
worse ...

Best regards,

Dirk

Am 28.02.2014 15:35, schrieb Bo-Christer Björk:
> Hi all,
>
> An interesting discussion. My perspective is not a moral one. The APC 
> charged should as far as possible reflect the quality and services of 
> the journal. The current full OA market (for APC journals) is a 
> relatively competive microeconomic market where customers(=authors) 
> decide where to submit in a situation where they usually have several 
> journals (some OA, most not ) to choose from. Quite in contrast to the 
> oligopolistic subscription market or the strange hybrid OA market. So 
> if BMC have in fact managed to establish their better journals as high 
> quality outlets there is no problem in rising prices. The authors 
> dedice. I don't think the UK funders decisions have yet had much 
> impact on the funding.
>
> I've personally paid APCs (or my department) for two articles in PLoS 
> and two in BMC journals nd I've found the benefit/cost ratio to be 
> excellent in all cases. In contrast I've made several grave mistakes 
> in the choice of where to submit to in subscription journals. Those 
> journals don't charge but there are high opportunity costs in delayed 
> publication, low visibility etc.
>
> As to the question of rising costs due to higher rejection rates I 
> find this to be a largely unsubstantiated claim. The IT infra is 
> already paid for, copy editing and invoicing costs only depend on the 
> published papers. Almost all of the costs of desk rejected manuscripts 
> and manuscripts rejected after long review processes are born by 
> unpaid academic editors and reviewers, that is the global scholarly 
> community.
>
> Best regards
>
> Bo-Christer
>
> On 2/28/14 3:50 PM, Heather Morrison wrote:
>> hi Jan,
>>
>> Good question! No, I have not looked into whether BMC's rejection 
>> rates have increased.
>>
>> Whether this would be an acceptable reason for increasing prices at 
>> all, or at a particular rate, is a different question.
>>
>> For example, unlike a print-based journal with size constraints 
>> imposed by the need to bundle articles into mailable issues, an 
>> online open access journal can easily increase in scale with more 
>> submissions. PLOS ONE has demonstrated the potential for translating 
>> rapid growth in submissions to rapid journal growth, with no price 
>> increase, technological innovations, and a more than healthy surplus.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Heather Morrison
>>
>>
>> On Feb 28, 2014, at 7:08 AM, "Frantsvåg Jan Erik" 
>> <jan.e.frantsvag at uit.no <mailto:jan.e.frantsvag at uit.no>> wrote:
>>
>>> Interesting numbers!
>>>
>>> Have you investigated if some of this increase could be explained by 
>>> an increased rejection rate? -- this would be an acceptable 
>>> explanation, in my opinion.
>>>
>>> The suspicion is, of course, that this could be one result of e.g. 
>>> the RCUK OA policy, which creates a less competitive market and 
>>> better conditions for generating super-profits.
>>>
>>> I think it was Guédon who asked why currency fluctuations always led 
>>> to price increases ... J
>>>
>>> Best,
>>>
>>> Jan Erik
>>>
>>> Jan Erik Frantsvåg
>>>
>>> Open Access adviser
>>>
>>> The University Library of Tromsø
>>>
>>> phone +47 77 64 49 50
>>>
>>> e-mail jan.e.frantsvag at uit.no <mailto:jan.e.frantsvag at uit.no>
>>>
>>> http://en.uit.no/ansatte/organisasjon/ansatte/person?p_document_id=43618&p_dimension_id=88187
>>>
>>> Publications: http://tinyurl.com/6rycjns
>>>
>>> *Fra:*goal-bounces at eprints.org <mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org> 
>>> [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] *På vegne av* Heather Morrison
>>> *Sendt:* 28. februar 2014 00:54
>>> *Til:* Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
>>> *Emne:* [GOAL] The dramatic growth of BioMedCentral's open access 
>>> article processing charges
>>>
>>> Thanks to the University of Ottawa's open sharing of their author 
>>> fund data, I've been able to calculate that over the past few years 
>>> there is evidence that BMC is raising prices at rates far beyond 
>>> inflation (and far beyond what could be accounted for through 
>>> currency fluctuations).
>>>
>>> Details are posted here:
>>>
>>> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2014/02/the-dramatic-growth-of-biomedcentral.html
>>>
>>> Note that this data reflects BMC practices and cannot be generalized 
>>> to open access publishing as a whole. Public Library of Science, for 
>>> example, has achieved a 23% surplus in the same time frame without 
>>> increasing their OA article processing charges at all.
>>>
>>> best,
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Dr. Heather Morrison
>>> Assistant Professor
>>> École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
>>> University of Ottawa
>>>
>>> Desmarais 111-02
>>>
>>> 613-562-5800 ext. 7634
>>> http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
>>> Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca <mailto:Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> GOAL mailing list
>>> GOAL at eprints.org <mailto:GOAL at eprints.org>
>>> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>>
>>
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