A new beginning for open access publishing?

It has been just over a decade since open access (OA) emerged as a radical new publishing model, challenging the long-established system of commercial scholarly journal publishing, and the OA movement has recently moved up a gear with the launch of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.

But the OA landscape may itself be about to undergo a radical change with the acquisition of one of its most successful publishers, BioMed Central (BMC), by Springer Science and Business Media, one of the very commercial publishers the open access movement is supposed to challenge.

In stark contrast to BMC’s comparatively small scale – it publishes just 196 titles – and trustee-guaranteed commitment to open access, Springer is the world’s second largest commercial publisher of journals in the science, technology and medicine (STM) sector, with more than 1,700 titles in its portfolio.

At first sight, then, Springer would appear to represent everything that BMC wants to sweep aside.

“The traditional business model for scientific publishers relies on restricting access to published research in order to recoup the costs of the publication process,” BMC’s website still continues to say at the time this article went to press. “This restriction of access to published research prevents full use being made of digital technologies, and is contrary to the interests of authors, funders and the scientific community as a whole.”

Subscription-based models of journal publishing are increasingly unsustainable in the face of a rising tide of published research that static library budgets cannot hope to acquire, the BMC website argues. So why does the open access publisher appear to be climbing into bed with the enemy?

When the acquisition was announced, BMC’s publisher Matthew Cockerill told IWR: “Springer has been notable among the major STM publishers for its willingness to experiment with open access publishing. There are plenty of publishers that have been fighting open access, but Springer was never one of them.”

Springer open choice
Springer already operates its own open access option, called Springer Open Choice. Authors who take the Open Choice option can have their articles made available in the appropriate Springer journals with full open access in exchange for the payment of a basic fee, referred to as an “article processing charge”.

Springer’s positive experience with Open Choice since 2004 seems to have been a key factor in its decision to purchase BMC. According Derk Haank, Springer’s chief executive officer, “This acquisition reinforces the fact that we see open access publishing as a sustainable part of STM publishing and not an ideological crusade.”

The initial reaction to the announcement has been fairly relaxed.

“It’s clear from Derk Haank’s statement that Springer wants BMC because it’s OA, not despite it,” read one comment on the Open Access News blog. The blogger added that BMC had an open access charter precisely to prevent a take-over reversing BMC’s commitment to OA.

“If Derk Haank says that OA publishing is a ‘sustainable part of STM publishing’, then it’s harder for anyone to say that it isn’t,” the blogger went on. “That includes the publishing lobby, which for years has played on fears of unsustainability in its campaign to derail or dilute national commitments to OA for publicly funded research.”

If some elements of the conventional publishing community really have been fighting tooth and nail to overturn open access, then BMC may be forgiven for its previous uncompromising line about the benefits of OA over the conventional publishing model. But following the acquisition, Cockerill has adopted a more measured tone.

“From a commercial point of view, open access is just another business model for covering the costs of publishing research articles,” he told IWR. “Neither model is inherently more or less commercial than the other.”

Open access is a new and growing model, he continued, because it makes good use of the economics of information on the internet, where additional copies can be distributed online at negligible cost. “Open access takes advantage of that economic reality to widen the dissemination of research results,” Cockerill added.

As an autonomous operating unit within Springer, BMC will continue to set its own article processing charges, and has made clear that there are no plans to raise charges as a result of the acquisition. Nor, according to Cockerill, is there any likelihood of BMC merging with Springer Open Choice and one of the brands being lost as a result.

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