[GOAL] Re: The Life and Death of an Open Access Journal: Q&A with Librarian Marcus Banks

[Guédon Jean-Claude]

Could I, once more, ask Richard Poynder (and many others) not to confuse Gold OA and APC-Gold.

APC-Gold is uncovering problems that had not been anticipated at first. Poynder mentions one in his note, and assigns it to the whole Gold OA. Predatory journals exist only because the APC-Gold business model opens the door to this odious kind od polluting and parasitic behaviour. However, and I repeat, APC-Gold is but one subset of Gold OA.

Is it so difficult to understand?

Just to make things very, very clear: Gold OA is agnostic with regard to business plans, and it does not limit itself to one business plan. This is a form of thinking-in-a-box that requires the breaking of the box.

Jean-Claude Guédon
________________________________
De : goal-bounces at eprints.org [goal-bounces at eprints.org] de la part de Richard Poynder [richard.poynder at cantab.net]
Envoyé : mardi 31 mars 2015 08:20
À : 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)'
Objet : [GOAL] The Life and Death of an Open Access Journal: Q&A with Librarian Marcus Banks

Despite their high profile advocacy for open access, many librarians have proved strangely reluctant to practice what they preach. As late as last year calls were still being made for the profession to start “walking the talk”.

On the other hand, many librarians have embraced OA, particularly medical librarians. In 2001, for instance, the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) began to make its content freely available on the Internet. And in 2003 Charles Greenberg, then at the Yale University Medical Library, launched an open access journal with BioMed Central called Biomedical Digital Libraries (BDL). One of the first to join the editorial board (and later to take over as Editor-in-Chief) was Marcus Banks, who was then working at the US National Library of Medicine.

Four years later, however, BDL became a victim of BMC’s decision to increase the cost of the article-processing charges (APCs) it levies. This meant that few librarians were able to afford to publish in the journal any longer, and submissions began to dry up. Despite several attempts to move BDL to a different publishing platform, in 2008 Banks had to make the hard decision to cease publishing the journal.

What do we learn from BDL’s short life? In advocating for pay-to-publish gold OA did open access advocates underestimate how much it costs to publish a journal? Or have publishers simply been able to capture open access and use it to further ramp up what many believe to be their excessive profits? Why has JMLA continued to prosper under open access while BDL has withered and died? Was BDL unable to compete with JMLA on a level playing field? Could the demise of BDL have been avoided?  What, if anything, does the journal’s fate tell us about the future of open access?

These and other questions are discussed with Banks in a Q&A interview here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/the-life-and-death-of-open-access.html