Rationale for implementing a modest publication fee for peer-reviewed manuscripts

For over 12 years we have published Medical Educations Online (MEO) without charging for access or charging authors for publishing. We operated the journal largely on volunteer effort and occasionally small subsidies for hosting the journal and purchasing a domain name.  We added Google Adsense  advertising to the web site with the hope of obtaining enough funding to cover the costs of operating the journal.  While the funds we obtain from the advertising provided some income, they  are not adequate for covering the full costs of services we feel are necessary to publish a truely professional journal . These include

• Encoding manuscripts into an XML format suitable for archiving in PubMed Central -  It is now a requirement that articles based on NIH funded research be placed into PubMed Central withn a year of publication. Authors can do this independently of the journal in which the article was published but having articles archived automatically by the journal greatly facilitates the process. Having MEO’s content stored in PubMed Central and we hope eventually Medline will significantly enhance access to the journal as well as ensure the content will always be available.
• Providing professional copyediting and typesetting of published manuscripts – Manuscripts that are published in MEO are currently copyedited by us. This takes a tremendous amount of effort that we are no longer able to do this on a volunteer basis. While the final versions of many of our articles are received from the authors in good shape, some need significant amounts of editing to be in a form we feel comfortable publishing.  Please note: the publication fee will cover basic copyediting.  Extensive rewriting to make a manuscript publishable will need to be managed by the authors.
• Joining CrossRef – CrossRef is an independent publishers association that disseminates digital object identifiers (DOIs) for scholarly material. DOIs uniquely identify digital content and are becoming an important means of referencing and locating digital content such as articles. Through CrossRef, MEO’s content will become significantly easier to locate through assigned DOIs for the manuscripts in the journal and the extensive cross-referencing database maintained by the organization.

Implementing a modest publication fee has been a very hard decision for us but I believe it is essential for maintaining the quality of the journal as well as improving the journal articles’ accessibility and stature. A tremendous amount of work goes into publishing a quality scholarly journal and it is virtually impossible to do it on volunteer effort alone. Although charging publication fees is not ideal, it is far better than charging reader for accessing the material in MEO via subscription or other fees.  Please note as well that:

• Authors from developing countries as defined by the HINARI program sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO) will have the fee reduced or waived based on the WHO HINARI criteria. Other authors will be able to request that the fee be waived or reduced based on hardship. Each request will be individually evaluated by the editors.
• The fees will only be charged after a manuscript has been accepted for publication and the final author revisions have been completed and accepted.

We always appreciate your feedback and thoughts about the journal at editor@med-ed-online.org and hope you will understand the need for the implementation of this fee.