Biomedical Digital Libraries Enters New Phase

By: Marcus Banks

When Charles Greenberg launched the open access journal Biomedical Digital Libraries (BDL) in 2003, many health sciences librarians were already passionate advocates for open access publishing.  There were multiple philosophical reasons to support open access, but underlying this discussion was a practical reality that’s easy to forget: widespread Internet access in the developed world, which revolutionized the way that scholars could communicate with each other.  Since health sciences librarians were promoting open access to their patrons, it was fitting that librarians themselves developed an open access journal.

The Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries (JERML) is another new publication that focuses on electronic resources.  JERML is published in print and online by Haworth Press, and is available by subscription only.  Both journals provide a niche for articles that may not be published in the more general-interest Journal of the Medical Library Association.

BDL covers similar terrain as JERML, but with a broad enough focus (“all aspects of digital library development in biomedical settings”) to attract authors from fields besides librarianship [1].  We also strive to offer prompt but rigorous peer review, with an ideal turnaround time of six weeks from submission to publication.

For several years BDL operated successfully, in partnership with BioMed Central (BMC).  We were a respected journal in the health sciences library space, publishing articles that generated buzz in the blogosphere and citations elsewhere.  From September 2004-April 2007 we published 25 articles in all. They remain available through BMC and are archived in PubMed Central [2]. 

The large majority of our authors—librarians and otherwise—once belonged to institutions that had purchased memberships in BMC.  These memberships enabled our authors to publish in BDL at no charge.  By April 2007, however, BMC’s membership models had significantly increased in expense, and institutions began cancelling or severely curtailing their memberships.  The decision by several Yale libraries to cancel their BMC memberships received the most attention, but this was a regular occurrence [3]. 

With institutional memberships to BMC declining, our core author base could not afford to publish in BDL. As of February 2008 the lowest article processing charge in the BMC collection of journals is $495; the top charge is over $2600 per article [4]. The lowest charge is too much for librarians, who typically receive little to no publication support.

With this article Biomedical Digital Libraries officially begins publication without requiring any author fees. We are hosted by Scholarly Exchange [5], and published using the Open Journal Systems suite developed by the Public Knowledge Project [6].  All interested readers are welcome to submit an article through our web site [7].  http://www.biodiglib.org/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions

As our experience with BMC shows, establishing stable funding streams for open access journals remains a challenge. In 2003 institutional memberships in BMC seemed more stable than they proved to be. The rise of blogging among librarians—which was much less common when Charlie founded BDL—is another change in the landscape. Today respected commentator Walt Crawford finds blogs to among “the most compelling and worthwhile literature in the library field” [8]. Over on his blog, librarian Eric Schnell supports the development of a “blog citation index” to track the transmission of ideas via blog posts [9].  

Although BDL promises prompt publication after rigorous review, we’ll never be as fast as publishing a blog post. Times have changed, and it will be interesting to see how our role in the communications ecosystem for health sciences librarians evolves in the next few years.  Come join us as we find out.

REFERENCES

1. Biomedical Digital Libraries: Editorial Policies. [http://www.biodiglib.org/about/editorialPolicies#focusAndScope].
2. Biomedical Digital Libraries: Browse Articles. [http://www.bio-diglib.com/articles/browse.asp?date=&sort=&page=1].
3. SciLib-Weblog: Library drops BioMed Central’s Open Access Membership, August 3, 2007. [http://www2.library.yale.edu/movabletype/scilib/archive/2007/08/library_drops_b_1.html].
4. BioMed Central: For Authors: Article Processing Charges. [http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/apcfaq#howmuch].
5. Scholarly Exchange. [http://scholarlyexchange.org/].
6. Open Journal Systems: Public Knowledge Project. [http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs].
7. Biomedical Digital Libraries: Submissions. [http://www.biodiglib.org/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions].
8. Walt Crawford: Cites & Insights 7:9-On the Literature. [http://citesandinsights.info/civ7i9.pdf].
9. Eric Schnell. The Medium is the Message: A Blog Citation Index?, November 2, 2007. [http://ericschnell.blogspot.com/2007/11/blog-citation-index-bci.html].