Re: BioMed Central copyright policy -- Stevan Harnad Stephen D. Clark 09 Feb 2000 21:48 UTC
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: BioMed Central copyright policy (fwd) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 18:52:49 +0000 From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 18:29:12 -0000 From: Matthew Cockerill <matt@BIOMEDCENTRAL.COM> Reply-To: September 1998 American Scientist Forum <SEPTEMBER98-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG> To: SEPTEMBER98-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG Subject: Re: BioMed Central copyright policy Steven Harnad wrote: > > Some very fundamental and explicit clarification is required before it > can be decided whether BioMed Central should be embraced or avoided by > authors: > So if BioMed Central is not intended for authors to deposit > either their > unrefereed preprints or their refereed reprints, what IS it intended > for? To be clear about BioMed Central's mission: We are setting out to build a *new publishing house*, that will accept original research articles, coordinate peer review, and publish them without delay through PubMed Central, with open access for all. Yes, we fully intend to compete with existing journals. Our guiding principle is that this new publishing house will offer a far better service to authors than they receive from existing 'archival' journals (the 90+% of journals with relatively low impact factors), and will be chosen by authors in preference to those journals. Certainly, BioMed Central will happily co-exist with top tier journals such as Nature, Science and Cell, which help scientists to identify the very most interesting research in their field. [Though we will also develop our own services, including reviews, commentary, and other tools for filtering the literature, to help scientists with the task of sifting the wheat from the chaff.] On the other hand, as stated, we certainly *do* intend to compete with the excessively priced archival journals from traditional publishers. We simply do not believe that attempting to superimpose a free self-archiving model on top of a traditional publication framework is a sustainable model. Free self-archiving is too much of a threat to subscription revenues to be widely tolerated by conventional publishers, so you cannot rely on traditional publishers to coordinate peer review. > > Could it be a rival new "megajournal," trying to compete for > papers with > the established journals? In that case, authors, in the interest of > their careers and the certification of their research, are better > advised to stuck with the refereed journals for now. Only if the > established journals continue to oppose online public self-archiving > does it make sense to consider transferring our research to > new journals > that do not. In and of itself, submitting one's work to a new journal > rather than an established one is a risky strategy. > Established journals > have reputations, known quality-control standards, and established > impact factors. New journals do not. > Essentially, yes. BioMed Central will compete with established journals. The current system of judging a paper's merits by what journal it is published in is: (a) imperfect (some papers - e.g. Prusiner's prion research - turn out to be far more important than was initially recognised by editors and referees) and (b) largely irrelevant for the majority of the 'archival' literature (citation impact 1.0 or lower) Far more important is to have good tools to track the importance of individual articles (using various metrics, based on editorial judgment, citation tracking, access statistics etc), and this is the strategy that BioMed Central is taking. > > Until further notice, open archiving's objective is to free the > current, established refereed journal literature from its publishers' > S/L/P access tolls, not from its publishers. > If you believe you can square that particular circle, fine. Our belief, however, is that without the revenues driven by restrictive S/L/P access tolls, conventional commercial publishers (especially of non-top tier journals, which are the most profitable) would have no reason to continue in the business. To open up publishing, a completely new model is needed. This is what BioMed Central is building. Matthew Cockerill == Matthew Cockerill Ph.D. (matt@biomedcentral.com) Technical Director BioMed Central Limited (http://biomedcentral.com) 34-42, Cleveland Street London W1P 6LB Tel. 0207 631 9127 Fax. 0207 580 1938