[Open-access] Fwd: [GOAL] Re: Finding a business model for a growing Open AccessJournal

Fri Jul 20 08:30:30 UTC 2012

Katie Foxall <katie at ecancer.org> asked:

>So does anyone know whether there is anything like SCOAP3 in the field of
>medical publishing?

There is not. Although SCOAP3's list of participants
(http://scoap3.org/whoisscoap3.html) is impressive this is a smaller
and much more homogeneous community than the field of biomedical
research. There are 5635 journals currently indexed by Medline, which
is itself not comprehensive; I think particle physics has only a few
dozen.

Nor should anyone try to build a SCOAP3 analogue for medicine. A
biomedical publishing monolith would be a target for intolerable
corporate corruption. A diverse publishing ecology is surely necessary
to avoid this. "Author pays" publishing is itself problematic: when I
first heard how much PLoS were going to charge authors for each
article, my first thought was "Blimey, that Harold Varmus must be on a
good salary!"*

So,

inspired by your table: http://ecancer.org/ecms/charges,
by George Monbiot: http://www.monbiot.com/2011/09/29/going-naked/,
by ArXiV: http://arxiv.org/help/support/whitepaper,
by the Journal of Machine Learning Research:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/,
and by Richard Smith
http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2012/07/03/richard-smith-medical-journals-a-gaggle-of-golden-geese/

I'd suggest you aim for radical transparency for your organ: from the
director's salary, to the editorial board's sandwich bill, to the last
paperclip and mousemat, get it online, with the objective of
convincing the reader that you're not merely payola-pushers for
whatever wondercure the drug companies have come up with this week.

Regards to all,

D.

*Just the faintest whiff of this remark is extractable from behind the
BMJ's paywall with the following search:
<http://www.bmj.com/search/advanced?author1=Carnall&text_abstract_title=Varmus&limit_from=1900-01-01&limit_to=2012-07-31&numresults=10&sort=relevance-rank&resultformat=standard&title_flags=all&abstract_title_flags=all&text_abstract_title_flags=all&searched=yes>
[Obviously you can't pay as many editors as the BMJ does, and expect a
"Blimey!" to make into the journal]
-- 
Douglas Carnall
dougie.carnall at gmail.com

http://cabinetbeezer.info

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