Meanwhile, the Pricing Folks at Nature and Science Rejoice

Peter Suber, who spends his days thinking about open access issues, posted this entry on his blog -- it's an excerpt from a press release issued by Yale explaining its libraries' decision to stop supporting BioMed Central's Open Access publishing effort. The problem was financial: the libraries paid for the author page charges, which allowed those papers to be freely available online. The first year's charges came in under $5,000 but soared to more than $31,000 in 2006, the second year. This year looks to continue that trend, the libraries said, adding that the business model was "unsustainable" and "failed to provide a viable long-term revenue base built upon logical and scalable options," according to the press release.