Business, Innovation and Skills CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by BMJ Group

BMJ Group appreciates the opportunity to contribute to this inquiry. We would be pleased to also provide oral evidence if necessary, and we look forward to the Committee’s conclusions.

Submitter: This evidence is submitted by Dr Trish Groves, Deputy editor, BMJ and Editor in Chief BMJ Open. Trish has 24 years’ experience as a medical editor. She heads the teams that peer review and select original research submissions to both BMJ (where she is Deputy Editor) and BMJ Open (where she is Editor in Chief).

BMJ Group has long and varied experience as an open access publisher. In 1998 the BMJ became the first general medical journal to make full text of its articles free to all online. The BMJ is now a hybrid journal with a) pay walled educational articles, debate, and journalism and b) full Open Access to all research papers (http://bmj.com)—for research the BMJ is a “Gold” Open Access journal that levies Article Processing Fees when research is accepted after peer review. BMJ Open (http://bmjopen.bmj.com/) is an online-only medical journal providing Gold Open Access: it publishes research studies and protocols and nothing else. The other approximately 40 BMJ Journals are hybrids that offer Gold Open Access as an option.

BMJ Group took part in the PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) project which investigated, from September 2008–May 2012, the potential effects of large scale, systematic depositing of authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts.

Summary

BMJ Group strongly supports the Finch report’s main recommendation that “a clear policy direction should be set towards support for publication of research in open access or hybrid journals, funded by article processing charges (APCs), as the main vehicle for the publication of research, especially when it is publicly funded”. [ref1] We are pleased to see this recommendation for the “Gold” model of Open Access and subsequent support for this by the Government. The Gold model is a well established and viable way to assure (through editorial review, peer review, and editing) the quality and relevance of scholarly articles, to provide professional services for authors, reviewers, readers, librarians, and funders; and to provide online hosting, curation, discoverability, digital innovation, and widespread dissemination. “Green” Open Access via self archiving is not able, on current evidence, to provide nearly the same degree or quality of access to publicly funded research.

Give that BMJ Group is supportive of these recommendations and policies, we have only a few comments to add at this stage.

1. The Government’s Acceptance of the Finch Report’s Recommendations

1.1 Gold vs Green. As a publisher of Open Access journals, BMJ Group has an obvious interest in the Government’s current preference for Gold rather than Green Open Access. Notwithstanding that, we believe that accepting the Finch report’s recommendations was the right thing to do, given the PEER project’s finding that self archiving is unlikely to generate a critical mass of Open Access content [ref 2].

1.2 Academic institutions and research funders. BMJ Group was pleased to see RCUK’s plans for APC awards over the next few years. We are currently in discussion with institutions and funders in the UK and internationally, to learn about their current and future needs and requirements for Open Access publishing and to consider a membership model that would provide authors with discounted APCs.

1.3 Research data. We were pleased to see the Finch report’s call for “a mechanism for enhancing the links between publications and associated research data” and hope that the Government’s Open Access policy will give due consideration to data sharing. The BMJ is actively campaigning, investigating, and advocating for greater access to medical research data, particularly from clinical trials (http://www.bmj.com/open-data) (para 2.5 for more details).

2. Rights of Use and Re-use of Open Access Research Publications

2.1. Current Creative Commons licence. Under current policy “BMJ Open Access” articles (ie all open access research articles in any of the BMJ Journals) may be reused by both authors and third parties, in accordance with the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons (CC) Attribution NonCommercial 3.0 Unported licence. With this CC licence, users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit) and adapt (make a translation or derivative work) the contribution for noncommercial purposes under the conditions in the full legal code (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/legalcode).

2.2 CC-BY licence. By April 2013 BMJ Journals will also offer the Creative Commons CC-BY licence for authors whose funders (including RCUK) require completely unrestricted reuse, and we will meet RCUK and MRC requirements for embargo periods for depositing articles in PubMedCentral (see para 2.4 for details).

2.3 Deposition. Authors opting for “BMJ Open Access” are already able to place the final published version of their article in the repositories of their choice. The BMJ and BMJ Open are fully “online first” journals, published continuously on bmj.com, and their Open Access research articles go straight into PubMedCentral on publication. The other BMJ Journals deposit all their Open Access articles in PubMed Central as soon as those articles are allocated to an issue.

2.4 RCUK policy. RCUK considers a journal to be compliant with its policy “if i) the journal provides via its own website immediate and unrestricted access to the publisher’s final version of the paper (the Version of Record), and allows immediate deposit of the Version of Record in other repositories without restriction on reuse...Or ii) where a publisher does not offer option 1 above, the journal must allow deposit of Accepted Manuscripts that include all changes resulting from peer review (but not necessarily incorporating the publisher’s formatting) in other repositories, without restrictions on non-commercial re-use and within... no more than six months between on-line publication and a research paper becoming Open Access.” We also note that the Medical Research Council (MRC) requires that “All research papers that have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, and are supported in whole or in part by a MRC-funded grant, must be made available from Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC) as soon as possible, and in any event within six months of publication.”

2.5 Re-use of research data. The BMJ and BMJ Open are campaigning for greater access to the raw data from original research studies, to maximise the veracity and completeness of the evidence base for medical practice and policy. Accessible raw data may also be reused by other researchers, for new analyses and for meta-analyses (which combine the results of several studies to increase the power and accuracy of the results). To encourage sharing of data the BMJ and BMJ Open require all authors of original research papers to state in their manuscripts whether, how, and where they will make the data available and what steps they have taken to protect patient confidentiality. Through partnership with the Dryad Digital Repository (http://datadryad.org/) both journals help authors to deposit their datasets in open, easily accessible files linked to their published articles. Furthermore, randomised controlled trials of drugs and medical devices are considered for publication in the BMJ only if the authors commit to making the relevant anonymised patient level data available on reasonable request. [ref 3]

3. Cost of APCs

BMJ Group takes the view that the market for Gold Open Access will develop with a range of APCs to reflect the services provided to authors and the impact, influence, and brand of journals.

For Gold Open Access to really work, it needs a sustainable business model.

This may require differential pricing and/or a range of waivers for authors in middle and lower income countries to ensure that they are not at a disadvantage when submitting articles.

We believe that funders need to recognise their responsibilities and ensure that there are sufficient funds available for APCs. This needs to cover dissemination of the total body of work arising from a funded study, not just the primary paper. Preplanned secondary analyses and follow up studies are often even more important to medicine than primary studies.

4. Uptake of Gold Open Access

4.1 Uptake has been relatively high by biomedical researchers and funders (http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/m/pdfs/openaccesscitations2.pdf). This is unsurprising, as the aims and ethos of the Open Access movement map well onto those of medicine. The Budapest Initiative for Open Access to scholarly literature asserted, in 2002, that “Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge” [http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/openaccess/read].

4.2 Uptake of Gold Open Access also varies by geography. For journals that waive APCs when authors lack the necessary funds—including BMJ, BMJ Open, and the Public Library of Science (PLoS journals)—Gold Open Access should be no bar to publication of research from low and middle income countries. However, Gold Open Access may be less important in countries where free local journals prevail, and where publishers (including BMJ Group) make paywalled content freely accessible to institutions in countries with low GDP through the HINARI Access to Health Research programme (http://www.who.int/hinari/en/).

4.3 Geography and Open Access mandates. Mandates are, of course, an important driver of Open Access and probably influence uptake of both Gold and Green models. ROARMAP, the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies, currently lists 450 mandates worldwide by institutions and funders [roarmap.eprints/org]. The region with the greatest number of mandates (244) is Europe and the country with the greatest number worldwide (81) is the US. The UK (with 54 mandates) comes second: a clear illustration of the country’s commitment to making publicly funded research open to all. The Government’s further support for Open Access is an important and welcome step along that road.

References

1. Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings: the Finch group. 2012. Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications. www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Finch-Group-report-FINAL-VERSION.pdf.

2. PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) Usage Research Reports and Final Project report 2012. http://www.peerproject.eu/reports/

3. Godlee F ,Groves T. The new BMJ policy on sharing data from drug and device trials. BMJ 2012;345:e7888

Trish Groves
Deputy editor BMJ and editor-in-chief BMJ Open, on behalf of BMJ Group

6 February 2013