Open Access Landscape in 2003

As we established BDL in 2003, there were several interesting developments in the open access landscape.

1. The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing was developed in April and released in June.

2. "Sabo bill," the Public Access to Science Act, was introduced in US House in June. The bill would have excluded "from copyright protection works resulting from scientific research substantially funded by the federal government." This effort failed, but was a precursor of the more moderate NIH Public Access Policy passed in December 2007.

3. The Public Library of Science launched in October.

4. The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in Science and the Humanities released in October.

In this environment BioMed Central operated an active independent journal program, which encouraged development of open access journals on discrete topics (perhaps exacerbating the problem of scholarly journal "twigging.") This opportunity, coupled with the larger ferment of interest in open access publishing, led to the development of BDL.

Origin of Biomedical Digital Libraries

1. Biomedical Digital Libraries (BDL) began as an independent journal published by BioMed Central (BMC) in 2004. Planning for the journal commenced in May 2003, and the first article appeared in September 2004. The interim period involved establishing an editorial board and ensuring a sufficient level of volunteer interest in maintaining the journal. I began as an Associate Editor in 2003, and became co-editor in 2006. Today I am the editor of BDL.

2. BMC is an open access publisher (which was recently acquired by Springer Science+Business Media.) In 2003-2004 many academic librarians purchased institutional memberships in BMC, which enabled anyone affiliated with an academic institution to publish for free or at a reduced cost. This ensured that our journal would have a core author base.

3. Motivation for stating journal:

• Complement-Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA, Open access)
• Competition-Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries (Subscription based)
  
• More prompt peer review than JMLA. (JMLA review speed has increased markedly since 2003)
  
• "Walk the walk, not just talk the talk." Librarians heavily promoted open access journals to faculty members, here was a chance to start one from the ground up.