Position of BMJ editors on making original research available for free and posting it on PubMed Central

1. Editorially the BMJ has been very supportive of the open access movement. We believe it to be of great public benefit for original research, much of it funded with public money, to be available to all for free. Some members of the board of the BMJ Publishing Group and some managers worry, however, that a publishing model that works may be supplanted by one that doesn’t, potentially destroying some important journals.
2. The full text of the whole of the BMJ has been available for free. All original research studies have been posted on PubMed Central from the moment of publication. But from January 2005 there will be a charge to access some material. The whole journal will, however, be available for free for the first week after publication, and original research will also continue to be free and passed immediately to PubMed Central.
3. Whether this arrangement for original research will continue after 2005 has yet to be decided.
4. The BMJ might move to an "author pays" model, and we are currently doing research among authors. The first round of research has shown that most authors approve of open access, know something about the author pays model, would be reluctant to pay out of their own pockets, but would be willing to pay if a journal like the BMJ began to charge. The next stage of our research would be to see what authors think of different models of author pays, including submission as opposed to publication charges.
5. One benefit of the author pays model might be that it would lead to a market in the various services that journals offer. For example, we currently receive some 8000 submissions a year but publish only 500. We get many papers out of our system as rapidly as we can in order to minimise costs. If we were paid we would be willing to give detailed feedback on how authors might improve their papers. We could also find out how much authors value copy editing or a service we have of producing short versions of papers for publication in the paper edition of the journal. Would they pay and if so how much? We also need to consider the impact of an "author pays" model on readers, journals’ traditional main customers. Authors may not, for example, be willing to pay for things that readers might find valuable–for example, clarity and checking of accuracy.
6. There does seem to be a lot of merit in a hybrid model, whereby journals charge for access to material where they have added value by producing it themselves and charge authors a comparatively small sum to make available for free research where undoubtedly most of the value is added by the authors themselves. At the moment journals are making money by charging for original research, where the value is added by the researchers. Charging for value added by others is unlikely to be sustainable in the long term.
7. The BMJ Publishing Group publishes some 25 other journals, which do not allow free access to original research at the time of publication. All of their original studies are freely available 12 months after publication on journal websites although not yet on PubMed Central. A complete back archive of these journals and the BMJ will soon be available on PubMed Central. These journals are much more dependent than the BMJ on subscription income. For now there are no specific proposals to change the business model of these journals, but we may well experiment with an author pays and hybrid model with some of them. We are currently undertaking some financial modeling to explore this.

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Are you forgetting an important & growing Marketing Target:- Patient Involvement? Could they be made a sub category to that of Student?

Paul G Champion
bmj.com, 8 Oct 2004 [Full text]