www.boimedcentral.com

Calling itself the "Open Access Publisher", the BioMedCentral (BMC) organisation is a remarkable evolution from the inconsistent and occasional philanthropy of the big journals. They set out a few years ago to make some of their content free, full-access and then promptly did several about-turns.

BMC operates under an Open Access Charter and under the guidance of a highly reputable international editorial board.

BMC contends that the traditional business model for scientific publishers (which relies on restricting access to published research in order to recoup the costs of the publication process) is becoming increasingly unsustainable.

Increasing amounts of research are being published while library budgets remain static. This restriction of access to published research tends to prevent full use being made of digital technologies, and is contrary to the interests of authors, funders and the scientific community as a whole.

In contrast, BMC's open access publishing model treats publication as the last phase of the research process. Article processing charges (APCs) cover the cost of the publication process to enable free and immediate access to the research articles. APCs ensure transparency and allow publishers to compete to provide the best service at the best price. By coupling the cost of publication to research budgets, APCs ensure the journal publishing system can scale to cope with an ever-increasing volume of research.

While full text access to a series of research journals may not initially seem to have much appeal to general practice, a quick perusal of the titles may change that view.

Indeed, the list has expanded at an extraordinary rate over the last two years and now includes over 100 titles. All of these titles are essentially e-journals and do not have a print edition. While there are other publishers who have dispensed with their print editions, the New Zealand Medical Journal being one close to home example, the prolific expansion rate of the BMC group reflects very favourably on the supervisory group editorial team.

There has at the same time been a settling of some of the competing print journals - for example the New England Journal of Medicine now offers a useful, if limited range, of their articles at six months post publication and the excellent site Free Medical Journals provides a regularly updated list of which journals provide which free-text services and from when.

The biggest problem general practice has always had is its academic naivety; naivety in the sense that off-site full access to hospital library e-journals has always been difficult, and a great many journals would have levels of full content which was not especially useful for general practice or general practice research. On the other hand, abstracts are a bit like "teasers" and have tended to be intentionally very light on detail.

In general practice we aspire to keep reasonably up to date with a wide range of subspecialties - aspirations which only get more and more difficult with the loss of good publications such as New Ethicals. There is also a general shortage of high quality and timely review articles. GPs love review articles, especially from key international contributors.

One of the best "pay" journals I have found for high quality and timely reviews has been the New England Journal of Medicine, at a cost of somewhere around US$80 per year.

Recent debates on open access publishing in the scientific online community have created a variety of responses from the traditional medical publishing houses - threatened perhaps in their future role by organisations such as BMC and the academics (spearheaded by the ex-JAMA and now Medscape editor in chief George Lundberg) who, by and large, support the concept of full free text access.

BMC journal research gets published faster than the print media has tended to and is less costly for authors.

Again, publications such as these are predominantly for a higher level of research content, rather than day to day general practice.
But a perusal of some journals can lead to a surprising array of relevant information for general practice. Recent audits of quality of content have been quite favourable. And those review articles will hopefully come through eventually.