Baltimore

A private company that provides researchers with information about funding opportunities and other activities announced last week that it will provide ‘front end’ services on Pubmed Central, the free repository for research results which the National Institutes of Health (NIH) plans to launch in January.

These services will enable societies and individuals to publish peer-reviewed research and are to be provided by Community of Science (COS), based in Baltimore, which keeps profiles of 500,000 researchers globally.

Huntington Williams, COS's president said his company was trying to formulate an economic model for publishing on Pubmed Central. The costs of processing and reviewing manuscripts would be covered by online advertising and direct marketing aimed at the scientists who select the reviewers and the reviewers themselves.

COS is the first organization to propose a business model that would allow electronic journals which publish on Pubmed Central—and therefore have no subscription revenue – to cover the costs of arranging for the review of scientific papers, and editing the text and illustrations into a standard format ready for publication.

These costs would be covered by selling web advertising and web marketing targeted at the reviewers themselves and at the boards of researchers that select them. The existing COS database would enable such advertising and marketing to be tightly targeted at these scientists' interests and personal habits.

Williams refused to speculate over how much money could be raised in this way, but the newsletter Science and Government Report quotes COS officials as saying that, while unspecified journals spend $4000 to process each paper, the new system might do it for $250. The model assumes that this amount, plus profit, could be generated by advertising and marketing aimed at referees.

Williams said the model would enable COS subscribers, as well as societies who wanted to publish their journals on Pubmed Central, to publish results in the new repository. COS and the societies would revenues from the advertising and marketing, he said.

David Lipman, director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the NIH and one of the architects of Pubmed Central, said that COS's plans were one of “a wide variety of business models” which the repository would accommodate. He adds that plans for PubMed Central's launch are focusing mainly on the part incorporating peer-reviewed content.