Conversations with ... Howard Bauchner, MD

Use the link to access the video and the transcript of the interview introduced as follows: “Hello and welcome, I'm Dr. George Lundberg for MedPage Today, and we are in Chicago having a conversation with what I was going to call the new editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Howard Bauchner, but he's not really that new any more. As a matter of fact you're the 16th editor of JAMA, and you've already outlasted at least one and maybe two of your predecessors, so congratulations....”  A portion of the interview covers open access as follows: “ LUNDBERG: ... And that brings me to the other controversial issue, and what's an online  journal, like the JAMA and the various JAMA specialist journals, going to do with the huge move towards open access and requirement of open access these days?...  BAUCHNER: ... obviously I've spent a lot time thinking about open access. It debuted about a decade ago, maybe a little more, and I think an initial concern arose about journals like JAMA, the Archives journals, then it quieted down for a number of years. And I think just the last year again there's been a lot of noise about open access. So many of your listeners, readers, who are familiar with the University of California San Francisco system, Harvard has raised concerns about the model that JAMA and Archives journals use.  I would say it's an unsettled environment, in the sense that the open access model makes authors pay, rather than necessarily institutions pay. So, regardless, publishing journals is generally an expensive affair, and whether those revenues are derived either through largely library sales and advertising, or they're generated by author fees, ultimately someone is going to have to support the scholarly mechanism that is journals. And so in some regards open access is a cost-shifting affair, rather than eliminating the cost.  LUNDBERG: There's no question about that. There's an issue of cost. Of course the biggest cost of publishing a medical journal is paper and postage, which you get rid of when you go open access on the Internet. But frankly, if the American Medical Association had not joined with the Association of Publishers of the United States to go with other commercial publishers to lobby in favor of a law that would overturn the current National Library of Medicine approach of open access after a certain period of time on PubMed Central for federally-funded research, there probably wouldn't have been this huge backlash. But that's where it is now, and I think it's an open issue -- open access, open issue -- and we'll see where it goes.  BAUCHNER: I think it is, and I think you're bringing up many different issues at once, so that's a longer conversation which I'm certainly willing to have.  LUNDBERG: Right, but not now, because we don't have time here, but maybe at another time we could have that, either on camera or not.  BAUCHNER: I'd be delighted to talk about it publicly.  LUNDBERG: I thought the Harvard letter to the faculty a month or two ago was very powerful, and the movements are there. So somewhere there is a compromise that might work that isn't excessively expensive to authors, at least for federally-funded research where there's no expense to the authors. That is written into the grants to the NIH so that open access can happen through PubMed Central.  BAUCHNER: Right. But I think, if people look carefully, across all of medical journals, the vast majority of research -- well over 60 or 70% -- is unfunded, and there are no grant funds available to pay to the journals...”