Biologists are in good Company

UK-based charity The Company of Biologists has decided to join the experiment by several traditional publishers to offer an 'Open Access option' to their authors.

From January 2004, any author whose paper is accepted for publication in one of The Company of Biologists (COB) journals will have the option of paying to ensure that their published article will be immediately and freely accessible via the Internet. This is a bold step for the charity that operates as a not-for-profit publisher based in Cambridge, UK, with publications including three prestigious journals - Development, Journal of Cell Science and The Journal of Experimental Biology.

A statement from the Company of Biologists explains that they are exploring the author-pays model "in response to the biological community's drive for freedom of access to scientific research," adding that "authors choosing to take advantage of the Open Access alternative will be charged a publication fee, which, as an introductory offer, will be heavily subsidized by The Company of Biologists." Initially at least, the author-pays model for some articles will run in parallel with the existing subscription model for all others.

The author-funded approach is emerging as a dominant strategy for traditional publishers who are interested in experimenting with hybrid author-pays and subscription models as part of a slow and cautious transition towards Open Access publishing. Oxford University Press (OUP) recently announced that it would be conducting a similar experiment with its flagship journal, Nucleic Acid Research, in the initial stage of a transition process that will move towards author-funded journals over a five-year period (see Open Access Now, September 8, 2003).

"Two important issues to address are how the Company might recover its publishing costs if we do move to full Open Access and how much publication fees will have to increase to achieve this," says Jim Smith, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Development. "In this regard it is good news that several funding bodies are receptive to the idea of providing publication costs as a specified component of the grants they award."

The Company of Biologists and OUP will each charge authors £500 per published article, which may represent less than a third of the real costs of publishing each article. Both publishers are to offer their versions of Open Access for a trial period and both predict that the pace of the transition will be determined by how well authors respond. The hybrid model offers them a way to manage the transition period, with little risk to their subscription incomes; this approach, sometimes referred to as the Walker- Prosser model, was developed by several American entomology journals.

"I think that nobody doubts that making the scientific literature immediately accessible to everyone should be our ultimate goal," says Richard Sever, the Executive Editor of Journal of Cell Science. "The challenge for non-profit publishers such as COB is to move from a business model that has served us well for decades to a completely different model without jeopardizing the future of our journals or becoming prey to our commercial competitors. We hope our hybrid experiment will allow us to do this and also to test the level of real enthusiasm amongst authors."

These experiments should be supported by the Open Access movement as they represent a genuine commitment by high-profile publishers to 'test the waters' and explore the feasibility of shifting their well-respected (and profitable) journals towards Open Access. Questions remain, however, about exactly how open the access is. A recently agreed definition of full Open Access includes not just immediate free access to electronic versions of each research article, but also the right to copy and distribute the work, as well as a commitment to deposit the article in a public repository (see Open Access Now, July 14, 2003) - and the latter aspects of the definition are crucial for indexing, searching and data mining. The Company of Biologists is replacing copyright transfer with an exclusive licence agreement, which allows authors to retain ownership of their work while providing the journals with the exclusive rights to publish it. Clearly, success with this experiment would encourage The Company of Biologists to accelerate its transition to full Open Access.

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