Why journals should not forget their past

For a few years, the International Society for Computational Biology only had one official journal, PLoS Computational Biology. This journal has always been fully open-access. The society has since re-affiliated itself with a 'hybrid' journal (Bioinformatics), whilst maintaining the affiliation with PLoS Comput Biol. However, those few for which PLoS Comput Biol was the society's only official journal illustrate that a large learned society CAN function, just with an open-access journal. (The publisher, PLoS, has always been open to requests for publication-charge waivers, for those authors who cannot afford the charge - this is also very important.) Money was presumably made in other ways e.g. membership fees, conference attendance fees. Since it appears feasible for a learned society to run without charging for its journal, it would be good to see larger numbers of societies experimenting with the approach.

Excellent article! You could have noted that the person responsible for the post WW2 shifting to a high profit approach to journals was Robert Maxwell and his Pergamon Press - now part of Elsevier of course.

Charles: Thank you. Do we know that Pergamon actually started the new approach, or merely that Pergamon, Elsevier and the Royal Society (sometimes) all started making more convincing profits from their journals in the 1950s? At present, I'm not sure of the cause, but would welcome suggestions of where to look...