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"
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> 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 [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
http://en.uit.no/ansatte/organisasjon/ansatte/person?p_document_id=43618&p_dimension_id=88187
Publications: http://tinyurl.com/6rycjns
*Fra:*[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
[mailto:[email protected]] *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
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
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Bielefeld UL - Head of Media Department
Universitätsstr. 25, D-33615 Bielefeld
E-mail: dirk.pieper at uni-bielefeld.de
Tel.: +49 521 106-4010 | Fax: +49 521 106-4052
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