A leading geochemical journal has moved to an open access publisher in an attempt to maintain its impact.

A leading geochemical journal has moved to an open access publisher in an attempt to maintain its impact.

BioMed Central will start publishing Geochemical Transactions, the online journal of the American Chemical Society’s geochemistry division, from 1 January 2006. Geochemical Transactions was first published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2000, and since 2004 has been published by the American Institute of Physics. 

The journal publishes only a handful of papers despite having the third highest impact factor in its field. A total of 10 papers were published in 2002 and seven in 2003. Generating more volume to satisfy a commercial publisher while maintaining high standards of papers is not easy and prompted the move to open access, said editor-in-chief Martin Schoonen from Stony Brook University, US. 

’Open access is not about filling a specific number of pages,’ said BioMed Central’s publisher, Matthew Cockerill. It has taken time, but a number of other learned society journals are now making the move to open access publishing, he said. Beilstein, the chemical database, has recently chosen BioMed Central to publish its open access Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry.

Schoonen said that young journals such as Geochemical Transactions are the first targets of library budget cuts, something that he has witnessed at Stony Brook. ’The crux of it is that the shrinking budgets are coming to the point where we have to cut journals,’ Schoonen told Chemistry World. ’A new subscription-based journal has no chance.’ Katharine Sanderson