Due to escalating costs, the Medical Library and the Science Libraries are no longer able to subsidize article charges for Yale faculty in BioMedCentral publications. Yale authors have a high acceptance rate and the costs keep increasing.

The Medical Library and the Science Libraries joined BioMedCentral in 2003 to support the concept of “open access” (OA) publishing which is dedicated to making research freely available electronically. The libraries also had the option of subsidizing article charges for Yale authors in BMC publications and chose to fund Yale authors for 100% of the article charges.

The libraries’ BioMedCentral membership represented an opportunity to test the technical feasibility and the business model of this OA publisher. While the technology proved acceptable, the business model failed to provide a viable long-term revenue base built upon logical and scalable options. Instead, BioMedCentral has asked libraries for larger and larger contributions to subsidize their activities. In 2005, BioMed Central article charges cost the libraries $4,658, comparable to a single biomedical journal subscription. As more articles were published and the charges increased, the cost of article charges for 2006 jumped to $31,625. The price of subsidizing article charges has continued to soar in 2007 with costs of $29,635 through June 2007 and up to $34,965 worth of potential charges for articles submitted but not yet accepted.

As we deal with unprecedented increases in electronic resources, we have had to make hard choices about which resources to keep. At this point we can no longer afford to support the BioMedCentral model.

We still believe in the principles of Open Access publishing and should BioMedCentral develop a viable economic model which allows them to more equitably share costs across all interested stakeholders, we would consider renewing our financial support.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or concerns about this policy.

Ann Okerson, Associate University Librarian for Collections, Yale University Library
R. Kenny Marone, Director, Medical Library
David Stern, Director, Science Libraries