From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2015 16:15:57 +0100

Despite their high profile advocacy for open access, many librarians
have proved strangely reluctant to practice what they preach. As late
as last year calls were still being made for the profession to start
“walking the talk”.

On the other hand, many librarians have embraced OA, particularly
medical librarians. In 2001, for instance, the Journal of the Medical
Library Association (JMLA) began to make its content freely available
on the Internet. And in 2003 Charles Greenberg, then at the Yale
University Medical Library, launched an open access journal with
BioMed Central called Biomedical Digital Libraries (BDL). One of the
first to join the editorial board (and later to take over as
Editor-in-Chief) was Marcus Banks, who was then working at the US
National Library of Medicine.

Four years later, however, BDL became a victim of BMC’s decision to
increase the cost of the article-processing charges (APCs) it levies.
This meant that few librarians were able to afford to publish in the
journal any longer, and submissions began to dry up. Despite several
attempts to move BDL to a different publishing platform, in 2008 Banks
had to make the hard decision to cease publishing the journal.

What do we learn from BDL’s short life? In advocating for
pay-to-publish gold OA did open access advocates underestimate how
much it costs to publish a journal? Or have publishers simply been
able to capture open access and use it to further ramp up what many
believe to be their excessive profits? Why has JMLA continued to
prosper under open access while BDL has withered and died? Was BDL
unable to compete with JMLA on a level playing field? Could the demise
of BDL have been avoided?  What, if anything, does the journal’s fate
tell us about the future of open access?

These and other questions are discussed with Banks in a Q&A interview here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/the-life-and-death-of-open-access.html