RE: BiomedCentral Revised Institutional Membership Model

["Stuhr, Rebecca" <STUHRR@Grinnell.EDU>]

I'm writing as collection development librarian at a small liberal arts 
undergraduate institution.  We have about 1,400 students.  We joined 
BioMedCentral last summer to support the spirit and purpose of open 
access.  The approximately $1,500 membership fee seemed reasonable and 
sustainable.  It is possible that under the new model we may only pay 
$525.00.  I know that we've had one faculty member publish in a BioMed 
Central journal.  But the potential costs of calculating charges based 
a published articles means that the library rather than grant funds 
will be paying for that publication.  It also means that we will have a 
hard time predicting our expenses. This seems to me to be veering away 
from open access and into a potentially very expensive subscription 
model.  There are many BioMed Central journals that we would not choose 
to subscribe to because of their highly specialized nature.  It seems 
as though we would also, then, be looking at being tied into a bundled 
situation--one that I think most libraries are trying to get away 
from.  We are choosing to wait and see what happens--but we would not 
be able to maintain a membership at any cost. 

Rebecca Stuhr

Rebecca Stuhr
Collection Development and Preservation
  Librarian
Grinnell College Libraries 
Grinnell, Iowa 50112
stuhrr@grinnell.edu


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