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

Tue Mar 4 10:01:47 GMT 2014

Dirk,
my experience managing our fund's account with BMC is the opposite - papers they return to authors disappear from the "in progress" list (and total) without my getting any notice, nor a chance to follow up the authors to see if the paper is still alive, or dead so it should be removed from my list of outstanding funding. (About the turnaround time, I have no point of view ...)

I do believe increased rejection rate is a legitimate reason for price increases, it is the only cost that cannot be recovered by APCs to the relevant articles. A submission processing charge would remove this problem.
Whether this is a good enough explanation for observed price increases is another matter.

Best,
Jan Erik

Fra: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] På vegne av Dirk Pieper
Sendt: 3. mars 2014 09:25
Til: goal at eprints.org
Emne: [GOAL] Re: The dramatic growth of BioMedCentral's open access article processing charges

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>

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