The following should be of considerable interest to those
who look to electronic publication as a way of decreasing
author's publication expenses.
D. R. Forsdyke. Discussion Leader. Bionet.journals.note
19 December 2001
Biomed Central adopts
processing
charge for articles
BioMed Central will introduce a
processing charge for
articles published in its
online journals beginning on
January 1 2002.
The decision to introduce
processing charges is
apparently the result of a consultation
process across the scientific
community and with representatives of key
funding bodies.
Within the scientific community, there was
widespread (although not
universal) agreement with the premise that
processing charges are
the best way to help pay for the cost of
maintaining free access to
scientific papers.
BioMed Central's business model attempts to
address the concern
within the scientific community that
subscription charges are strangling
the communication of scientific research.
This concern is clearly
demonstrated by the more than 28,000
signatories to the Public
Library of
Science open letter (
http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org ),
the establishment of the PubMed Central
archive of freely accessible
research ( http://www.pubmedcentral.gov ),
and the more than 1000 submissions to
BioMed Central's open
access journals over the past year.
BioMed Central believes that the payment of
a small processing
charge in return for immediate and
permanent free access to
published research
will become a widely accepted and standard
part of science funding
policy. Preliminary discussions
with funding bodies and research
institutions suggest that payment of
processing charges from research grants and
infrastructure funding
will be
allowed. With this in mind, it has been
decided that from January 1
2002 there will be a US$500 processing
charge for any article
accepted for publication in BMC journals.
Not all authors will be required to pay for
the processing of their
research articles; BioMed Central will
waive the article processing
charges for authors in developing countries
and in cases
of genuine hardship.
www.biomedcentral.com/info/newjournals.asp
