Frederick Noronha
An innovative experiment in publishing, by a medical doctor from Mumbai, has sparked off a wide range of academic publications, giving authors hundreds of new readers and a genuine chance to create relevant new knowledge.
Mumbai-based Medknow is an open publishing firm that builds academic (mostly medical) journals, puts them online, and makes them accessible to all.
While sharing all this useful information without a fee, it makes a tidy profit for itself and also builds both journal and authors` readership and credibility.
Started by Dr Dev Kumar Sahoo (33), a medical doctor from the Indian commercial capital, Medknow Publications Private Limited promises to ?provide solutions for the scientific publishing community, helping in publication and dissemination of the research and thus converting research to knowledge.?
?We now have 33 journals being published by us,? child-specialist Dr Sahoo, MD (Peds), DCH, DNB and FCPS, told this correspondent. Today, Medknow has a staff of 20, and also does a lot ofoutsourcing.
What`s surprising is that this experiment flies in the face of the traditional wisdom -- that if you share your knowledge, you won`t be able to earn from it. MedKnow shares its information promiscuously, and not just survives, but thrives.
?Printing and mailing a journal eats up 85-95% of the cost of producing the journal. If you can spend 5-15% more, you can get it online. You won`t lose readers or subscriptions (but putting it online). On the contrary, the advantages of increased readership is tremendous,? he explains.
?Without open access, there`s no scope for a journal (from a developing country in particular) to reach any quality. Even misconduct is more visible in this model,? he says, narrating how a plagarism case was detected via open access.
Open access (OA) refers to the free online availability of digital content. It is best-known and most feasible for peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly journal articles, because scholars publish without expectation of payment.
Not just are Indian medical journals increasingly tempted by the idea of open access publishing, but there a growing interest coming in from abroad too -- particularly the so-called `developed` countries,? Dr Sahoo said.?Without open access, a journal (from a `developing` country) is not going to reach any quality.
Some figures are revealing: their first online venture, the Journal of Post Graduate Medicine from India (jpgmonline.com), grew from a 2001 print circulation of 300-400 to about 3-4000 visitors per day. That is, almost a million visitors a year. Most of the foreign visitors are from the US and Europe, and from institutions like Harvard, California and Pittsburg.
Open access also helps boost visibility of the journal, argues Sahoo. Quality articles are no longer in short supply, otherwise a perennial problem in the Third World. JPGM had 19 articles submitted in 1999, and 770 last year. Its impact factor has ?increased visibly?.
Likewise, open access won`t mean a loss of subscriptions even for smaller journals.?Very few (academic) journals in India have a subscription of over 200-300 journals,? says he. ?None of our journals that we`ve published for more than three years have lost subscriptions. In fact, we have gained our print subscriptions.?
By being `open access` journals, they enter into the ?virtuous circle of accessibility? (and get noticed via online networks like Bioline, bibliographic database, on OAI complaint servers, search engines, PubMed, and individual web sites). This only boosts the accessibility and impact of these journals.
The big question is what makes this form of publishing viable?
Sahoo believes that small journals suffer from a typical set of problems -- limited circulation, few authors, few subscriptions, few citations, poor visibility. If these are taken care of, viability isn`t an issue any more. As he puts it: ?If you don`t have citations, you don`t have a journal.? So, the main goal is fighting the circle of limited accessibility. Because all journals are available online for free this increases visibility and citations. Money comes in by way of print subscriptions (which don`t decrease just because a journal is available online, on the contrary), membership fees (paid by association members to the association), reprints, and ?of course? advertising. But no author fees. Western authors and their institutions could afford these, but probably not authors in this part of the globe.
Medknow Publications calls itself ?the largest publisher in India for academic and scientific biomedical journals?. It promises to improve ?the visibility and accessibility of the science from the developing world? and to work towards ?continuously re-inventing the publishing methodology? through its ?high quality peer-reviewed scholarly journals?.
Its `fee-less-free` means that authors are not charged to be published (charging authors is an acceptable practice in Open Access globally). Their model provides ?immediate free access to the electronic editions of the journals without charging the author or author`s institution for submission, processing or publication of the articles.?
Medknow, with over 35 print and online journals says it ?is probably the largest open access publisher of print journals in the world which does not charge author or author institution?.
Each journal published by Medknow has its independent website. The websites use the OpenURL standard, making it easy for libraries to link users as directly as possible from citation to the full text of the article. ?The open access policy has resulted in more than a half a million article downloads in a month from all the journals,? says Medknow. So, obviously, there are many queuing up to have a journal -- online or print or both -- published by Medknow. And this firm, which grew out of a doctor`s initiatve, convinces other professionals that it makes sense to trust their publishing activities in their hands.
Medknow says it has successfully put in place an original electronic manuscript submission and peer review system http://www.journalonweb.com) for ?the first time in India?. This system has been in use since 2001 by authors and peers across the globe and over 10,000 manuscripts have been processed through it, it adds. The eliminating use of postal or hard copy submissions, this online submission and processing of articles has resulted in considerable decrease in the submission-to-decision (turnaround) time.
Most of the journals published by Medknow are archived at multiple places including OAI-compliant e-print repositories (http://bioline.utsc.utoronto.ca/) and sites such as Bioline International (http://www.bioline.org.br). ?Thus, ensuring the long term archiving and accessibility of the published content,? says Medknow.
It convinces authors that it`s work to publish in an Open Access format because it means:
* Immediate open access: Higher visibility, greater research impact
* No submission charges: No author fee for submission or publication
* Online manuscript submission: Faster review, cost saving, ease of tracking
* International visibility: Through bibliographic databases and open access
* Higher visibility: `Search across all journals` facility at all journal sites
* Self-archiving permitted