Open access publisher BioMed Central has announced that its OA journal BMC Medicine has published an article which compares the scientific impact of open access with traditional subscription publishing and has found that both of these publishing business models produce high quality peer reviewed articles.
The debate about who should pay for scientific publishing is of continuing importance to the scientific community but also to the general public who not only often pay for the research though charitable contributions, their taxes, and by buying products, but are also affected by the results contained within these articles. Many publically funded agencies, such as the Wellcome Trust and NIH require that scientific research sponsored by them be made freely available to the public. However the issues are not as simple as just putting the results of research on line. Scientific research goes through the quality control filter of peer review and journals act as gatekeepers performing quality-assuring peer review, and who provide web-based repositories. Scientists currently rely on publishing in peer reviewed high quality journals to show that their research itself is of good quality, is of importance to their field of research, and consequently improves their chances of obtaining funding to continue their work.
One way of measuring quality is by impact factors calculated from citation data. Bo-Christer Bjork from Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, and David Solomon from Michigan State University compared the impact factors of 610 open access journals and over 7000 subscription journals.
The citation rate for subscription journals was overall 30 percent higher than for open access ones but this difference was largely due to a high share of older OA journals, particularly from regions like Latin America in the citation indexes. When like was compared with like, for instance, journals founded after 2000 from difference regions or disciplines, the differences disappeared.
BMC Medicine is the flagship medical journal of the BMC series. It publishes original research, commentaries and reviews that are either of significant interest to all areas of medicine and clinical practice, or provide key translational or clinical advances in a specific field.
