My posting on Friday about the clashing values of academic institutions and businesses prompted a comment from Bill Hooker about linking to his blog posting about the pricing structure at BioMed Central (BMC). His comment and the e-mail I received this morning from BMC (reproduced below) got me rethinking about the nature of open access publishing.
What is BioMed Central?
It is a business. It has advertising (even an “Sales and Marketing Director” listed on its “In-House Team” page) and it generates revenue for services beyond the per-article charge at the time of publication. As the e-mail below says, one can purchase “direct emails and keyword search term sponsorship” from BMC. To the best of my understanding of U.K. tax law, it is not a registered non-profit organization. (Its contact page says BioMed Central Ltd is “a company registered in England and Wales with Company Number 3680030 [...] and having VAT number GB 4662477 23.”) In its FAQ page “How does BioMed Central make money?” BMC describes revenue-generating possibilities:
As a publisher, BioMed Central obviously has to be profitable to survive as a service for the biomedical community. We believe that if we add value to raw data, we are entitled to charge for access to it. If a journal commissions topical or thematic reviews, and so helps individuals orientate themselves amidst the complexity of available research, it may have a subscription charge. Furthermore, if we construct and maintain community alerting services, allowing users to discover where, in the eyes of their peers, quality and significance lie, we will charge. An example of such product is Faculty of 1000. We are also carrying advertising on our site, and we will be creating other products and services for which a charge will be made.
I think it is safe to say that BMC is well within the relm of what can be characterized as a “business.”
Compared to PLoS
Another larger player in the open access publishing arena is the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and it serves as a good point of comparison. Number six of its nine core principles is labeled “Financial fairness”:
As a nonprofit organization, PLoS charges authors a fair price that reflects the actual cost of publication. However, the ability of authors to pay publication charges will never be a consideration in the decision whether to publish.
In contrast to BMC, PLoS is a 501(c)(3) Public Charity under the U.S. IRS tax code. As a consequence it files an IRS form 990 that allows us to see the details of its operation and gauge whether there is an undue burden on revenues based on expenses. PLoS lists ways to contribute to its effort, including individual contributions and institutional membership/sponsorship.
Conclusions
In my own mind, I had equated “open access” with “not-for-profit” — and in the case of BMC this is not the case. I had thought that open access was universally like PLoS’ model. Just to be clear about this, I’m not saying that academic values are good and business values are bad. I am saying that we should not expect businesses to act based on the values that drive academic institutions and that we shouldn’t be surprised when businesses behave like businesses. I was surprised to learn that BMC is a business.
Perhaps BMC is ultimately a “better” model. Does the revenue from advertising and direct marketing to registered users ultimately drive down the cost of per-article publishing? Do the subscription (pay-for) services offered by BMC not interfere with access to the underlying article data? (Here’s a good question: can one take the open access article data from BMC and construct competing value-added services? Based on reading point #8 in BMC’s Terms and Conditions, it would appear not. Update 20070815T0907: The answer to this question is yes, one can. See the first comment by Matt Cockerill, followed by my reply and Matt’s announcement of changes to the Terms and Conditions page that, to my reading, makes points eight and nine of BioMed Central’s Terms and Conditions much clearer.) These are all questions to be answered as the open access model evolves.
I would be curious to learn in the comments if others thought that “open access” equated to “not-for-profit”. It is entirely possible that I’m the only one, in which case this jester just made a fool of himself.
The E-mail
This is the e-mail that arrived in my inbox overnight:
(This post was updated on 15-Aug-2007.)
From: "BioMed Central Advertising" <monthlyoffers@biomedcentral.com>
To: peter@ohiolink.edu
Subject: BioMed Central August News and Offers
Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2007 11:24:29 +0100
News from BioMed Central
www.biomedcentral.comAugust Offer
15% discount on all direct emails and keyword search term sponsorship booked before 28th September 2007!
Did you know that with BioMed Central you can choose to target your direct emails by institution type, specialty, country, techniques used and job title? Did you also know that you will be guaranteed to get maximum exposure from your emails as well as getting good value for money?
10,000 email names with targeting selections would be $3750 but with a 15% discount this will only be $3187 saving you $563!
BioMed Central web ads offer you a bigger impact than advertising on search engines.
Why not try a keyword package?
Advertise on search results when your keyword is used.Choosing 5 keywords or phrases would be $1000 for 6 months but with a 15% discount this will only be $850.
New Portal and Gateways!
New portal from BioMed Central highlights importance of open access to scientific and medical literature for the developing world. Sponsor the new Open Access and Developing World portal and be part of increasing access to the scientific and medical literature for those in the developing world.
The new Global Health and Microbiology and Infectious Diseases Gateways are now available for sponsorship.
www.biomedcentral.com/gateways
Contact BioMed Central today at advertising@biomedcentral.com or on +44(0)20 7631 9168 – or reply to this email for more information.
You have received this message in a belief that it would be of interest.
If you would not like to receive any further messages from BioMed Central, please reply to monthlyoffers@biomedcentral.com with the word “remove” in the subject line.BioMed Central Ltd, Science Navigation Group, Middlesex House, 34-42 Cleveland Street,
London, W1T 4LB, United Kingdom
7 Comments
Whoa, I didn’t know BMC was a spammer. (They can call it “direct mail” all they want, weasel about opt-in and opt-out, plead the benefits of targeted ads; I don’t care. Commercial email sent to someone who didn’t ask for it is spam, and spam is internet cancer.)
I don’t like that Point #8 much, either, and I’m no lawyer but it’s not immediately clear to me how the restriction on copying is compatible with their license.
Peter, Bill
A couple of responses:
First, Peter asks “Here’s a good question: can one take the open access article data from BMC and construct competing value-added services? Based on reading point #8 in BMC’s Terms and Conditions9, it would appear not.)”
Absolutely you can - that is the whole point of the Creative Commons Attribution license under which all the open access research that we publish made available. As long as you appropriately attribute the source, both commercial and non-commercial reuse of the content is allowed. Point #4 makes this clear.
All points 8 and 9 of the Terms and Conditions of the website are saying is that the other content on our websites (i.e. the general information pages, FAQs etc) are (c) BioMed Central.
You might ask why that’s important? In fact, it’s more important than you might think. We recently had a situation where a competing commercial publisher had plagiarized large chunks of our site (including our detailed ‘instructions for authors’) word-for-word and was re-using that material (without any form of acknowledgement) to set up a series of competing commercial open access journals.
Secondly, Bill:
BioMed Central is most definitely not, and never has been, a spammer. We take privacy and related email-marketing policy issues very seriously - our reputation depends on it
Users who register on BioMed Central have to explicitly check an additional box if they wish to opt-in to receive information from third parties about products relevant to their interests. If you do not ask to receive this information, you will not be sent it - however many people do ask to receive it, and find it a useful source of product information.
In addition, like many other journals such as Nature (for profit), Science (not for profit) and the PLoS titles (not for profit), BioMed Central incorporates appropriate advertising sponsorship within its journal content, in the form of banner ads and keyword-driven text ads. These ads are intended to be relevant to the user, and they help to defray the cost of publishing, so that it does not have to be carried entirely by the academic research community. Ironically, in this respect, the advertising carried by BioMed Central is an example of exactly the type of broadening of the base of financial support that Yale Library called for.
Matt, thanks for the thoughtful response. Maybe I’m a bit of a crank when it comes to commercial email and advertising in general. Also, I shouldn’t have conflated a proper opt-in (box unchecked by default — not spam) with opt-out. Did Peter have to check a box to wind up getting the email he posted above?
Re: the email Peter received:
I believe that email would be received by organizations (mostly in the commercial sector, but some such as OhioLink in the academic sector) which have had contact with BioMed Central in the past about advertising opportunities. For anyone who is no longer interested in this information, the email provides a clear opt-out option.
That may be the case, but the language of the Terms and Conditions is not clear. Perhaps it is a problem in translation — either from British English to American English or from Legalese to English. These are the relevant parts:
It would be clearer if #8 started “With the exception of material covered by clause 4 you may not….”
I doubt I signed up for this information — I’m not even sure I have created a BMC account in the nearly three years I’ve been working for OhioLINK. Since OhioLINK receives a feed of BMC article content for its own electronic journal center, it is possible that an overreaching marketing engine harvested OhioLINK staff e-mail addresses to add to its database. (In my position at OhioLINK, I get a lot of mail like this and didn’t really consider it Spam even if it was unsolicited.) The contents of the email, though, did serve as a launching-off point for a review of the nature of BMC itself.
We have now updated the legalese in Terms and Conditions page, hopefully making it clearer to all concerned that all content flagged as Open Access is fully available for reuse and redistribution. Thanks for the useful feedback.
Matt
Matt — thank you for clarifying the Terms and Conditions page. The modified text is much clearer to me (and hopefully to others as well).
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