RE: Does BMC's business model conflict with Editorial Independence?

[<matt@biomedcentral.com>]

Phil,

BioMed Central's independent journal editors are, in general, 
responsible for all aspects of administering peer-review on their 
journal.

As an independent journal grows and publishes more research, this 
effectively means the editors are each running a small editorial 
office. Clearly, the costs associated with running that office 
will tend to scale in proportion to the number of articles 
published. This is why BioMed Central's payments to independent 
journal editors are generally proportionate to the number of 
articles pubished. That is the nature of open access publishing.

The suggestion that open access journal editors are conflicted 
because their journal's revenue depends on article processing 
charges is really just the same old suggestion that open access 
journals in general are conflicted by article processing charges. 
But as has been widely pointed out, if that is a conflict of 
interest, then all journals with page charges have that same 
conflict of interest. And since traditional publishers justify 
subscription price increases based on the increasing page count 
of their journals, traditional publishers too face the very same 
potential conflict of interest.

See: 
<http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/inquiry/myths/?myth=integrity>

In fact, the stronger argument is in the opposite direction - 
because open access journals are generally less reliant on 
reprint revenue than traditional journals, there are many 
potential conflicts of interest that they avoid.

See for example:
<http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020138>

Matt Cockerill
Publisher, BioMed Central

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Phil Davis [mailto:pmd8@cornell.edu]
> Sent: 10 May 2006 16:26
> Subject: Does BMC's business model conflict with Editorial
> Independence?
>
> Matt Cockerill at BMC wrote:
> "In fact, according to the terms of the new agreement (under which
> more than half of BioMed Central's independent titles operate),
> journal editors *do* receive payment, in the form of a share of the
> revenue from article processing charges for their journal."
>
> Response:
> I am not a medical journal editor, but this statement by the
> publisher of BioMed Central seems to have direct conflicts with
> Editorial Independence, and leads one to suspect whether BMC editors
> have financial conflicts of interest that prevent them from
> exercising good judgement.

[SNIP]