The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has decided to pay article processing charges if HHMI-funded scientists choose to publish in open access journals from BioMed Central (BMC). Articles published in BMC journals will be immediately free on the Web.

The current BMC article-processing charge ranges from $500 to $2400, depending on the journal. These charges will not come out of an HHMI investigator's budget, so will therefore be in addition to the amount awarded.

HHMI recently declared that all funded researchers must make their paper freely available in PubMed by six months after publication. This month, BMC announced that Yale University has discontinued their membership, due to increases in fees which Kenny Marone, director of Yale's medical library, says have grown in excess of $30,000 over the past year.

In FY06, HHMI spent $538 million on scientific research. It is the second largest biomedical funder in the U.S. HHMI-funded researchers have already published 200 articles in BMC journals, paid for by the investigators.



Editor's note (posted August 21): This blog has been updated from a previous version.