Data on JMLA’s Open Access Experiment
T. Scott Plutchak, The impact of open access, Journal of the Medical Library Association, October 2005.
Excerpt:
Between June of 2004 and May of 2005, the number of unique users accessing the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) and its predecessor, the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association (BMLA), on the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central (PMC) system averaged just over 20,000 per month. When I first saw these numbers on the PMC administration site, I was astonished. The members of the Medical Library Association (MLA) itself (who we might presume are the main audience of the JMLA) number only about 4,500, and the print run of the journal is generally in the neighborhood of 5,000 copies. It seemed likely to me that the number of unique readers in any given month would be just some fraction of that core audience….
I wondered if PMC has some kind of formula that they use to translate the number of IP addresses into number of readers, so I emailed Ed Sequeira, the project coordinator, at PMC. Further astonishment! He pointed out that it was likely that my supposition about DHCP was balanced by the aggregation of users behind corporate firewalls and then told me that, from surveys that they have done, there are half again as many actual users per IP address. Thirty thousand unique readers?…I can think of few things more likely to gladden the heart of an editor than this kind of evidence of the reach and impact of the journal on which he lavishes so much time and attention. I have no doubt that we would not be seeing these sorts of numbers if the JMLA were not freely available on the Web. From the standpoint of readership and reach, MLA’s experiment with open access would appear to be a resounding success. But much of the discussion of open access during the past few years has focused on the risks. What of those?…So I looked at the revenue and membership figures for the last ten years. I wanted to examine the trend lines and see if anything appeared to change significantly around 2001/02, when the JMLA went up on PMC….
Subscriptions had been falling for a decade, but the drop from 2002 to 2003 was far more dramatic than the previous declines. The number of subscriptions declined again in 2004, although not as dramatically, but revenue went up slightly, thanks to a modest rate increase. Whether this indicates a trend or not is still too early to say….Perhaps more worrisome from the standpoint of the long-term health of the association is the impact of an open access journal on the members’ willingness to remain members. Here, the results are more encouraging. Total membership has declined during the entire period, but the biggest drop occurred in 2000/01, just before the PMC debut….To probe the views of members further, I worked up a quick online survey….I asked what degree of impact the JMLA’s free availability had had on their decision not to renew their membership. Seventeen respondents fit in that category. Fourteen indicated little to no impact, two were neutral, and one indicated that it had had a major impact. When I asked the current members if the JMLA’s free availability would make them more or less likely to renew their membership, 61% indicated that it would have no bearing; but, for 30%, it would make them somewhat to much more likely to renew. On the downside, 5% felt that it would make them much less likely to renew….
Other questions in my survey indicated that the free availability would make people much more likely to read articles from the older issues and would make potential authors more likely to submit manuscripts. These, of course, are the things that an editor loves to hear….Despite what I said near the beginning of this editorial, it is too early to label the experiment an unqualified success. But has the attempt been worth it so far? I look again at the PMC statistics. Twenty to thirty thousand unique users? Has it been worth it? Oh, yes!
Read the whole article at: http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1250314
