In a controversial move, the journal Medical History is moving from being an "Open Access, no Article Processing Fee" journal to being a closed, copyrighted, fee-charging journal.
1957: the launch
The first issue of Medical History, edited by W. J. Bishop, appeared in 1957 (front matter). Medical History
rapidly established itself as a journal of primary importance in the
field of medical history, especially in the anglophone world. In many
ways the evolution of the journal's content from 1957 to the present day
is a mirror of the evolution of the field of medical history itself,
from the reminiscences of senior physicians to the work of
professionalised medical and social historians. From its earliest
issues it included the writings of such figures as Charles Singer, Lynn
Thorndike, and Walter Pagel, and over more than half a century Medical History has become a journal of record for its academic field.
At
its launch, the journal was printed and published by Dawsons of Pall
Mall. An annual subscription to four issues cost $7.50, or $2.50 for
society members.
1960: Wellcome Trust funding
In 1960, just a year before his death, Bishop published a letter
to the readers announcing that the Wellcome Trust had made a five-year
grant to enable the journal to continue publication. This grant was an
appropriate decision by the Trust, at that time still bound by the terms
of Sir Henry Wellcome's Will that included a stipulation that the Trust should support the study of the history of medicine (see, e.g., the first and first and second reports of the Wellcome Trust).
1965: Wellcome Trust ownership
Five
years later, when the Wellcome Trust's initial grant came to an end,
Dawsons decided no longer to publish the journal, and "surrendered all
their rights in the journal." Its publication was transferred to the
Wellcome Historical Medical Library (see here).
Since the WHML was owned and solely funded by the Wellcome Trust, this
change effectively institutionalised the Trust's support for Medical History. That support has enabled the journal to continue publication until last year.
2005-2011: The Open Access years
But
the single biggest change in the journal's history came in 2005. That
year, the Wellcome Trust issued a public statement as follows:
Medical History – entire archive freely available online
The first complete archive of a medical history journal has been deposited into PubMed Central, as part of a £1.25 million programme led by the Wellcome Trust, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the US National Library of Medicine (NLM).
In addition to the digitization of the back catalogue, all future issues of Medical History will be made freely available online at the time of publication.
This project supports the Wellcome Trust’s position of supporting open access to scientific literature, and complements the ongoing work to establish a UK PubMed Central.
(Bold print mine. See full announcement.)
The editors of Medical History also announced the move to Open Access in a statement in July 2005, and an agreement was signed between the Wellcome Trust and UCL in September 2005 that stipulated that all intellectual property for the journal was vested in UCL, that all management decisions would be taken by the editors at the UCL Wellcome Centre, and that the journal would be completely Open Access.
Following these changes, the entire archive of Medical History, from 1957 to the present, was digitized and put online at PubMedCentral (here), and publication in print and online was handled by the British Medical Journal Group.
Between 2005 and 2011, in accordance with the Wellcome Trust's Open Access policy, each issue of Medical History has appeared in print and online more or less simultaneously. As the Trust says on its website,
It is a fundamental part of our charitable mission to ensure that the work we fund can be read and utilised by the widest possible audience. We therefore support unrestricted access to the published outputs of research through our open access policy.
Not only were the articles in Medical History published Open Access, but the journal charged no Article Processing Fee (APF). For both authors and readers, Medical History was free. And authors retained their copyright under a Creative Commons license. These are the most enlightened policies in the three key issues of modern academic publishing: free authorship, free readership, and authors' retention of copyright. (A large contemporary literature discusses the new business models underlying these new structures of academic publishing.)
As everyone knows, these policies are critically important for authors on low incomes, including scholars from eastern Europe and many parts of Asia and Africa. Only these policies guarantee that readers everywhere can benefit from research findings, and that researchers can contribute their own work for open publication and dissemination without encountering a financial barrier. The Wellcome Trust and the journal's editors broke important new ground in this policy change, adopting the highest ethical and research standards.
2006: EAHMJ partnership
In 2006, Medical History partnered with the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health, becoming the official journal of that association, and accepting EAHMH members onto its board of editors (announcement). In doing so, the journal returned to its roots in one sense, since it had started in 1957 as the organ of a consortium of medical history societies. At the time of writing (spring 2012), the EAHMH website still presents Medical History as its society journal, stating that,
The EAHMH encourages publication in the journal Medical History. Medical History is a refereed journal devoted to all aspects of the history of medicine and health, with the goal of broadening and deepening the understanding of the field, in the widest sense, by historical studies of the highest quality. It is also the journal of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health. The membership of the Editorial Board, which includes senior members of the EAHMH, reflects the commitment to the finest international standards in refereeing of submitted papers and the reviewing of books.
Plans were made in 2009 to bring Medical History and the EAHMH closer together, creating a single subscription to both the journal and to the society. However, before these plans could be finalized, the Wellcome Centre closed and the management of the journal moved briefly into limbo.
2010: The Wellcome Trust Centre shuts
The chief editors of Medical History
were always senior research staff at the
Wellcome Historical Medical Library. That institution changed
its name several times, finally becoming the "Wellcome Trust Centre for
the History of Medicine at University College London" in 2000 (announcement by
its then Director Roy Porter).
Ten years later, in 2010, in a controversial change of policy, the Wellcome Trust announced the closure of the Wellcome Centre (Wellcome Trust announcement, Times Higher Education reports here, and here, The Telegraph).
The majority of senior staff retired or dispersed to other centres
worldwide, and Centre's programs in teaching and research were
closed. A small cross-departmental group remained at UCL, focussing on
the history of neuroscience (here). What would happen to Medical History?
2011: Interregnum
After
the closing of the Wellcome Trust Centre, editorial control of the
journal passed to UCL staff, including Roger Cooter and Vivian Nutton,
who wrote an editorial statement in 2011 that was bullish about the
future health of the journal, in spite of the closure of the Centre and
the presumed loss of Wellcome Trust funding (Nutton and Cooter 2011 and Cooter 2011). Just one more issue of Medical History
has appeared in the Open Access PubMedCentral archive since the last
statement, the fourth and last for 2011. At the time of writing (Feb
2012), references to Medical History on the UCL website lead to dead links.
2012: Cambridge University Press takes over
An announcement on 30 Jan 2012 by Cambridge University Press explains that the editorial control of Medical History
has moved to the University of York, and that the journal has a new
editor, Sanjoy Bhattacharya, a reviews editor, and an editorial board
comprising no fewer than forty-six members, about thirty more editors
than the journal has ever had before. The journal is still supported by
the Wellcome Trust, though details are not given. According to an announcement by Bhattacharya, "the ownership of this journal has passed to Cambridge University Press."
Cambridge
University Press (CUP) is now operating the journal as a Closed Access
journal. If you wish to publish your article Open Access with a
Creative Commons license, and retain your own copyright, you must pay
$1350 or £850 (here). CUP requires all non-paying authors to sign a contract transferring their copyright to CUP (contracts here).
The contract permits authors to post a pre-publication,
pre-final-editing copy on their own or their university's website. The
terms also state that, "All articles will automatically be deposited in PubMedCentral upon publication" (statement).
But since PubMedCentral is an Open Access, full text website, it is
hard to see why an author would pay $1350 if the full text of their
article is to appear free in PubMedCentral in any case. The answer
seems to be in the terms of CUP's contract, that suggests that it only
the pre-publication version of articles that will appear in PubMedCentral from now on, and not the final published version, as in the past.
At the time of writing (Feb 2012) the January issue of Medical History has not appeared in PubMedCentral. It will be interesting to see the terms on which it does appear there.
 | |
| CUP website |
 |
| PubMedCentral |
Cambridge University Press is keen to promote the journal by pointing to its illustrious past, and has a "Highlights of a Decade"
page, showcasing selected articles. But several of these articles,
although originally published Open Access and copyrighted by their
authors, are presented on CUP's website as being published by CUP, and
have been assigned a DOI pointing to CUP's website, and a statement that
the article was published online on 07 December 2011. There is no
reference to PubMedCentral, where the articles were actually published
online, and much earlier, and where they are still freely downloadable. CUP
did not publish these articles. The full text of the articles is not
available on the CUP website, nor is there any suggestion that these
"Highlights of a Decade" can be read freely at PubMedCentral.
Maybe CUP will solve these problems in the future, and come to a more graceful accommodation with the Medical History's Open Access past.
---
References and notes
Editors of Medical History:
- W. J. Bishop, (1957-1961), 5 years.
- F. N. L. Poynter (1962-1972), 11 years.
- Edwin Clarke (1973-1979), 7 years.
- William F. Bynum and Vivian Nutton (1980-1999), 21 years.
- William F. Bynum and Anne Hardy (2000-2002), 3 years.
- Harold J. Cook and Anne Hardy (2003- 2010), 8 years.
- Vivian Nutton and Roger Cooter (2011),
- Sanjoy Bhattacharya (2012- )
Resources
- John Symons, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine : a Short History (London: Wellcome Trust, 1993), is the best account of the Institute's history.
- Vivian Nutton, "Half a Century of Medical History" Medical History, 2007: 1-2, is a brief overview of the journal's history.
Declaration of interest
I have published in Medical History.
