Matthew Cockerill is in the interesting position of having watched an idea grow from being dismissed as fantasy to its acceptance as fact.

When Cockerill joined BioMed Central as its first employee in 1999, he arrived at the dawn of open access (OA) publishing. “The idea of OA publishing was then pretty much unknown,” he says, “but we wanted to start from the ground up to build a web-based publishing company that would be streamlined without a lot of the inefficient stuff that seemed to have become part of publishing over time.”

Cockerill joined BioMed Central as its technical director, hired by Vitek Tracz, group chairman of the Science Navigation Group, a loose-knit group of companies involved in science publishing and other technology-driven areas. He is now the company’s publisher.

Cockerill has spent his career on the cusp of where science and technology meet. He has a PhD in biochemistry and a long-standing interest in the use of technology to structure and manage biological and medical knowledge.

He has had a long-standing working partnership with Tracz. He worked for Tracz’s group for several years and played a major role in launching BioMedNet in 1996, the pioneering website for biologists that incorporated the Trends and Current Opinion review journals. When BioMedNet was sold to Elsevier, Cockerill went with it and worked for Elsevier for just over two years, before setting up BioMed Central with Tracz in late 1999.

“It was very different working at Elsevier, and a very useful, mind-broadening experience. But then Vitek got in touch about the idea of OA publishing, which was then essentially unknown. He was convinced it was the way forward.

“When we set up BioMed Central, we wanted really efficient systems for managing online journals and peer reviews, so in a frenzied few months in early 2000, we built these systems from scratch and started accepting submissions.”

The structure and approach of BioMedCentral is self-consciously different from those of other, more traditional publishing companies. Being part of a small group of companies gives BioMed Central a different feel. The aim is to keep the group flexible, according to Cockerill.

“It is well known that the ability of companies to stay flexible is fundamentally about their size. Once a company gets above about 150 staff, it has to work in a whole other way. It has to put different sorts of structures in place, which mean it can no longer be so fluid.”

Cockerill has had several roles within BioMed Central, starting off as technical director, and subsequently becoming operations director. His job title is now that of publisher, which equates to a managing director role.

Dangerously big
BioMed Central now has almost 100 staff, so it may be getting dangerously near to becoming a different company, but working within a fluid group helps to keep each of the separate companies flexible, according to Cockerill. The group shares some services, such as IT and HR, and collaborates closely in areas such as marketing, but each company retains complete autonomy.

“It’s a living organism,” Cockerill says. “For people outside the company, the internal relationships are not necessarily visible or important. We simply provide services.”

Since its launch, BioMed Central has been building up partnerships to bolster both its editorial content and its innovative approach to publishing technology and systems.

“We have close collaborations on technology with several academic organisations,” Cockerill says. One example is BioMed Central’s repository service, which is built on the open source foundations of the DSpace digital repository, developed by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard. “We also work with commercial partners in areas that are complementary to open access publishing; we are looking at areas such as text mining and semantic web technology.”

As OA has become accepted across the wider publishing market, the challenges facing BioMed Central have changed. “In the early days, the challenge was to get the scientific community to recognise there was an issue, and that research could be more effectively communicated, but that ceased to be a challenge about 18 months ago. That was the point where I think we realised that OA had grown to have a life of its own.”

What does this mean for BioMed Central, which was first in the field? “It means having to adapt to the changing market. We now have to provide a service that is not just about pioneering. There are definitely transitions that we have to make as an organisation, but this has happened in many other industries where disruptive technologies have changed the market. We see an opportunity to be part of an important new market and we want to be in a good position to take advantage of that opportunity.”

That entails constantly looking for new journals to publish. Cockerill says new fields, such as stem cells and genomic medicine, are creating opportunities for growth. “It’s about having the right nose to sniff out interesting new areas.”

Keeping on top of technology, to make systems more efficient and able to deliver services to customers more effectively, is another important plank of the BioMed Central strategy.

“What we do is interesting,” says Cockerill. He cites US biologist Mike Eisen, co-founder of the Public Library of Science, who compared a publisher’s role to a midwife’s: to make the birth of a scientific article as smooth and painless as possible.

In a pioneering market, BioMed Central attracted those who wanted to be part of the OA revolution; in a more mature market, those potential customers will have other choices.

“Soon, everyone else will be OA too, so there has to be enough extra reason to publish with BioMed Central.” Providing an excellent service to authors is vital.

Naturally, the maturing of the OA market has not been entirely smooth. While open access offers advantages, the market as a whole appears unsure about how to get there.

“One of the points we make is that it is no good spending money on research if the results then get trapped under a bushel.”

Investing in systems to disseminate the results of research is sometimes criticised as money diverted from research, but Cockerill argues it is necessary to ensure that all research is communicated more effectively across the scientific community.

It is an argument that Cockerill believes is gaining greater sway within the global research community, but there is clearly further to go down that road.

One of the questions about OA publishing is about how to make money from it. It’s a question that BioMed Central has had to face, and on which it has had to be flexible.

“You do need a different model for open access, given that you don’t have subscription revenue, and there were always going to be challenges in finding the model that works,” Cockerill says.

In the early days, BioMed Central did not make any charges. Its journals still do not have colour figure charges or submission fees. But there is an article processing charge for most of the open access articles published in BioMed Central journals. On average, the charge is between $1,200 and $1,500.

“Our costs are very low if you compare them with other OA and traditional publishing costs, but it is a still a shift,” Cockerill acknowledges.

In December 2006, BioMed Central increased its standard article processing charge from £750 to £850 for the BMC series of journals and other titles for which peer review is organised in-house. There are higher charges for in-house journals with higher editorial input and costs.

The company says the increase is in line with the true cost to BioMed Central for article production, developing and maintaining websites and editorial systems, providing customer service, and marketing and editorial support.

Cockerill points out that major research funding bodies, particularly the Wellcome Trust, have expressed support for this publishing model. BioMed Central maintains that there is no inherent reason why OA publications supported by article processing charges cannot be sustainable and profitable.

Nonetheless, adapting to changing markets can be painful. In mid-2006, several BioMed Central journal editors expressed concerns about increases in article processing charges, about a new code of conduct and about increasing overlap between existing and new journals. At the time, Cockerill acknowledged that there were issues that needed improving, and said the company was working on them.

Big winners, little winners
Now, looking at the market as a whole, he says there are “not unexpected tensions” when any market changes. “For example, research organisations are always wary that although everyone will gain under OA, some will gain more than others. On the whole, though, the transition has been surprisingly painless.”

Cockerill points out that the policies of fund providers such as Wellcome and CERN have helped the market move forward. “That has made it easier, because we are not the only ones encouraging OA. Overall, we have made huge strides towards getting the OA model right. We have realistic article processing charges and our institutional payment models are also now realistic, so all the building blocks are in place.”

Cockerill says that as a result BioMed Central is very close to breaking even. “That’s not just nice for us as a company, but hugely important in terms of the wider OA market. We are so high profile – we want to show that open access can work in the real world.”

He now wants to see even further investment in the OA model by the whole research community.

“Funders such as Wellcome and CERN feel they have a responsibility to invest in the OA offering,” he argues.

Cockerill also feels the UK government could do more to support OA publishing and ensure that the UK does not lag behind other countries in this area.

Cockerill has been well placed at BioMed Central to watch the rise of open access publishing. “From my early days of involvement in biomedical research and web portals, I have been interesting in building new services. One of the most rewarding things about my career has been the involvement in seeing the scientific community respond to the benefits of open access.

“This is now a global movement. I came into this from my own perspective as a biologist, trying to deal with a flood of data and results. One of the founding reasons for BioMed Central was the idea that if you want to encourage the development of tools to analyse research results, as a basic starting point you need to ensure all the research is openly accessible. By opening up access to the original research, we’re helping the community develop better tools to work with that research.”