You know, one would think - given the idealism at UCT, and the strong support for Open Access models of pretty much everything - that we as an institution would be members of one of the biggest worldwide initiatives for open access scholarly publication.

I refer, of course, to the BMC or BioMed Central family of journals: as an Editor of one of these, I get regular communications such as this, below.

BioMed Central Institutional Members Update

The following institutions have taken out full BioMed Central membership, allowing their researchers to publish in any of BioMed Central's journals without directly paying any article processing charge: [my emphasis]

Instituto Aragones de Ciencias de la Salud, Zaragoza, Spain
Agenzia di Sanita Pubblica, Rome, Italy
Biology Centre ASCR, Institute of Plant Molecular Biology, Branišovská, Czech Republic

Researchers from the following institutions are now entitled to a discounted article processing as these organisations have taken out BioMed Central's Supporter Membership:

Roma Tre Universita, Rome, Italy
Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, New York, United States
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, United States
East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina, United States
Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Gran Canaria, Spain
Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, United States

A full list of all BioMed Central Member Institutes is available from the BioMed Central website.

 Going to this web site reveals...that not ONE South African institution is a member, and nor are we as UCT apparently a "supporter member" either.

It's not as if the charges are that onerous, either: supporter membership would cost us something like R90 000.00 per year, for a 15% rebate on publication charges, and full membership would cost as much as the page charges are per year, with a loyalty discount.  From the web site:

Prepay Membership enables an organization to cover the whole cost of publishing for their investigators when publishing in our open access journals. No additional fees will be paid by individual authors. This is an advance payment system whereby customers pay upfront for accepted articles authored by their investigators to be processed and published. Upon publication, the full Article-Processing-Charge (APC) for the journal in question, minus a loyalty discount, will be deducted from the account.

Now UCT staff and students are increasingly publishing in these journals, some of which are now quite prestigious, and many of which are rapidly increasing in impact factors: in fact, 39 articles were published last year that had Author Affiliation = University of Cape Town, including 4 from my group.

If one considers that it costs ~R10 000 to publish a decent article in a BMC journal, that is ~R400 000 worth of publications.  This may sound a lot - but if each of these brings in ~R90 000 in subsidy from DoE, UCT would be paying out only 1/9th of direct income, without even considering the loyalty discount.

Really, really, UCT, we need to consider such expenditure as being very well worth it: publication in electronic open access journals is very much a growing phenomenon, and would showcase our works better than any other medium.  The trouble is, given the paucity of hard science and other research funding in SA, R10K / pop represents a substantial portion of most people's research budgets - so it is simply not going to happen.

A Research-Led Afropolitan University (ReLeAfroUni?) would make it happen...wouldn't it??