P.Mean: Author pays model (created 2011-12-31). News: Sign up for "The Monthly Mean," the newsletter that dares to call itself average, www.pmean.com/news.

I received an email through a long chain of people that originated from the editor of Academic Medicine, Steven L. Kanter. He is soliciting short submissions to his journal for the 2011 Question of the Year: What improvements in medical education will lead to better health for individuals and populations?

Ah, I though, an interesting question and I may have something to contribute. First, I should look at a few sample articles. So I clicked on the link to very first article in the current issue: "Faculty Development for Medical Educators: Current Barriers and Future Directions." Here I encountered the barrier I was worried about. The Academic Medicine website informs me that "You could be reading the full-text of this article tnow... if you become a society member (I am a society member Help), if you become a subscriber (I am a subscriber Help), or if you purchase this article."

The original article calling for responses to the 2011 Question of the Year, appears, quite appropriately, on page 1 of issue 1 of 2011, but again, it is not available on the web unless you pay.

This is very strange. In the solicitation to submit responses to the 2011 Question of the Year, Dr. Kanter stresses that "anyone is eligible to submit an essay." But many people who might want to submit an essay would not know about this solicitation. I only saw this solicitation because I am a friend of a friend of a friend of Dr. Kanter. To be fair, I probably could find these articles, as I am a part-time faculty member in the School of Medicine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. But the point is that access to medical research is tightly restricted, to the detriment of medical students.

If medical journals would switch from a "reader pays" model of publishing to an "author pays" model, then more people would aware of barriers for medical educators described in the first article mentioned. The article would probably be blogged more often and readers of the blog could access the full article to see the details themselves. Teachers could include a wider range of research examples in their classes without worrying about falling on the wrong side of the "fair use" provision of copyright law.

A "reader pays" model would make the results of research available to schools in third world countries which are unable to afford huge subscrption fees and who should not have to rely on the capricious charity of commercial publishers.

ButAcademic Medicine, like many other medical journals, adopts a "reader pays" model of financing. In an "author pays" model, the articles in question would be available to a wider audience.

http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.d196.full

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