2008: Scholarly Exchange

Realizing that author fees were the primary barrier to publishing in BDL, we sought to remove them.

Our first solution was to publish with Open Journal Systems, an open access publishing suite developed by the Public Knowledge Project. At the same time we secured a year's free hosting from Scholarly Exchange, and began recruiting articles. There were no author fees.

Whereas BMC offered the valuable services of automatic citation in PubMed and archiving in PubMed Central, these was no longer available. I reasoned that getting new articles online and accessible was the first step toward restoring the health of the journal.

Difficulties quickly surfaced, however:

• Very low author uptake, despite the lack of fees (maybe there's a twigging problem, with just not enough articles to go around.)
• I significantly underestimated the time involved in the mechanical aspects of running the journal. BMC had fulfilled all of these services for us.