BMJ  2005;330:1211 (21 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7501.1211-a

Letter

Access controls on bmj.com

Dual models are possible

EDITOR—Further to Chalmer's letter asking that true open access be restored to bmj.com,¹ it is possible to make revenue (and be self sustainable) by having a complete open access policy and still having paying subscribers and members. In open source software such a dual business model is common. You can get the operating system Linux for free, but you can also buy it from a vendor, including some value added services. The journal I have been publishing since 1999, the Journal of Medical Internet Research, has such a model. It is an internationally recognised and indexed journal in eHealth research, which was one of the pioneers in open access publishing (before Biomed Central came on the market and long before the Public Library of Science mutated from an advocacy group to a powerful publishing house, competing for submissions against the open access journals it originally meant to foster).

The Journal of Medical Internet Research has a dual publishing model. Every article is freely available on the web, but we also offer value added services for personal or institutional members (subscribers), who pay a nominal fee to get additional services such as the ability to download whole issues as PDF files or to download topical collections of articles as electronic books ("eCollections"). We think that with this model and a "lean publishing" strategy (most processes are supported by open source software, requiring only 1.5 inhouse employees to run the journal) we may well be the first sustainable open access journal—other than journals such as CMAJ, PLoS, BMC, etc, which either have large grants or subsidies or are making huge losses.

Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, Toronto, Canada M5G 2C4 geysenba{at}uhnres.utoronto.ca

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Competing interests: GE is editor and publisher of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, an open access journal.

References

1. Chalmers I. Access controls on bmj.com: restore true open access to bmj.com. BMJ 2005;330:904 (16 April.)[Free Full Text]

Related Article

Access controls on bmj.com: Restore true open access to bmj.com

Iain Chalmers
BMJ 2005 330: 904. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]