WVU Libraries: Open Access - Open Access Publishers

Three Open Access Publishers Available to WVU Faculty with Reduced Fees (Library Membership or License Agreement)

Open Access journals are peer-reviewed journals that provide free, online access to their articles. They do not charge subscription fees to readers or libraries. Instead, they cover their costs through publication fees to authors. The WVU Libraries have purchased institutional memberships in BioMed Central and Public Library of Science which reduce the required author publication fees for WVU faculty researchers. The Libraries have also negotiated favorable terms for WVU authors in Oxford University Press Open Access Journals. These three arrangements are in process as of March 2008. Other agreements may follow.

The WVU Libraries are very interested in the future of scholarly communication: the global system by which information is created by researchers, distributed by publishers, and organized, made accessible, and preserved by libraries. The Libraries support the changes proposed to this system by recent developments in open access.

BioMed Central (BMC) is a UK-based scientific publisher that publishes 186 peer-reviewed journals including Arthritis Research & Therapy, Breast Cancer Research, and Critical Care. All research article content published by BioMed Central is free, but some of their journals require a subscription in order to view editorials, review articles, epubs ahead of print, and information contained in supplements. BioMed Central also provides subscription-only services such as Faculty of 1000 Biology, which is a current awareness service highlighting recent biological research.

Supporters Membership in BioMed Central allows institutions to pay a flat rate annual Membership fee based on the number of biology, chemistry, physics, and medical researchers and graduate students at their institution. Members of the institution are then given a 15% discount on the Article Processing Charge (APC) when publishing in BioMed Central journals.

Cost
The WVU Libraries will pay for the annual cost of a Supporters Membership, currently $7,974 per year.

Benefits of BioMed Central Supporters Membership
- All researchers within the Supporter Member Institution can take advantage of a 15% discount on the Article Processing Charge when publishing in BioMed Central journals. The APC ranges from $1,000 to $2,500 to publish an article.
- The institution benefits from a cost-effective flat rate annual membership fee. This provides the institution with an affordable way to support both open access publishing and their researchers.
- Member organizations are entitled to a 15% discount on all institutional subscriptions to BioMed Central's additional products and services, such as Faculty of 1000 Biology and Faculty of 1000 Medicine. Of note is the fact that researchers at the WVU Health Sciences Center have been requesting Faculty of 1000 Biology.
- Supporter Members have a customized webpage on BioMed Central, which acts as a permanent showcase for the institution. This page features titles and links to relevant articles generated by the Member institution and published in BioMed Central journals. These articles can be sorted by publication date, most viewed in the last 30 days, and most viewed in the last year. The number of times each article has been accessed is also displayed.
Impact Factors
Impact factors of BioMed Central journals for 2006 are fairly impressive. Their top ten journals ranked by impact factor include Genome Biology, BMC Evolutionary Biology, Breast Cancer Research, BMC Genomics, Arthritis Research and Therapy, BMC Bioinformatics, BMC Developmental Biology, BMC Molecular Biology, Critical Care, and BMC Immunology. Breast Cancer Research actually ranks 39th out of 127 Oncology journals, while Arthritis Research and Therapy ranks 6th out of 23 Rheumatology journals in terms of impact factors.
Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. They currently publish the following journals: PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, PLoS Pathogens, PLoS ONE, and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. PLoS journals use a business model in which their expenses are recovered in part by charging a publication fee to the authors or research sponsors for each article they publish. Authors who are affiliated with an Institutional Member are eligible for a discount on this fee. Fees currently range from $1,250/article for PLoS ONE to $2,750/article for PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine. PLoS anticipates that authors can pay for these fees by including them in their research grants. However, PLoS will waive its publication charge in whole or in part for any authors who say they cannot afford it. In return for the publication fee, authors receive the following benefits:
- Their work has maximum impact...anyone with an interest will be able to find it, read it, download it, etc. There is growing evidence that open access increases the usage and citation of published work.
- Authors have unlimited space to publish. PLoS has no restriction on the number of pages, figures, tables, etc. in an article.
- Authors retain their copyright and the right to be cited as the originators of their work.
- PLoS journals provide added value content plus summaries that increase understanding of the work.
- PLoS deposits published papers immediately into PubMed Central.
Impact Factors
It is noteworthy that the impact factors for PLoS journals are impressive. For 2006, the impact factor for PLoS Biology was 14.101, while that for PLoS Medicine was 13.750. In fact, PLoS Medicine actually ranks 5th out of 103 General & Internal Medicine journals, superseded only by New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, JAMA, and Annals of Internal Medicine. PLoS Biology's impact factor is ranked first out of 65 Biology titles.

RSS Feeds
PLoS journals also provide a variety of RSS feeds to which researchers can subscribe to keep up-to-date on content. For example, PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology have RSS feed options for new articles, table of contents, and "top articles," which are the most popular articles from the last seven days.

Benefits of Institutional Membership
PLoS institutional memberships are expressions of support for PLoS' mission, and provide an incentive for authors to publish in PLoS' open-access journals. Institutional members pay an annual fee, at the level of their choosing, which entitles:
- Affiliated scientists to reduced charges for publication in all PLoS journals
- Libraries to institutional usage reports for all PLoS publications
- Member Institutions to a listing on the PLoS website Members Page, along with a list of the articles published in PLoS journals by affiliated authors
Cost
The WVU Health Sciences Library will pay the annual cost of institutional membership in PLoS. The annual cost will be based on WVU faculty PubMed submissions and number of publications in all other areas. We estimate this will be $2,000 to $5,000 per year.
As part of the Libraries' license agreement for electronic journals from Oxford University Press, WVU faculty may publish in Oxford Open Access Journals at a reduced fee. A list of journals in this collection is available on the Oxford University Press website.

Other agreements with open access journals will be sought as the Libraries review license agreements in the future.

Justification

West Virginia University Libraries membership in BioMed Central and Public Library of Science would demonstrate the institution's support of the open access movement, which advocates making scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. It would also provide an incentive to WVU's researchers to publish in the open access journals produced by these two publishers, as it would give them a significant discount on the publication fees. It would make research from West Virginia University much more accessible around the world, as both BioMed Central and PubMed Central articles are linked from PubMed, which is the National Library of Medicine's free interface for the Medline database.

Of the eleven universities identified in 2004 as peer institutions to WVU, six are currently institutional members of both BioMed Central and PLoS. These include the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Ohio State University, the University of Minnesota, Michigan State University, Texas A & M University, and the University of Maryland, College Park.