Just under 10 years ago I joined a startup. First one I’d ever joined. It wasn’t a startup in the conventional sense. It was a journal within a science publisher called GenomeBiology. 

It was a startup in that it was very experimental. It was essentially venture funded by the Chairman of the Current Science Group, Vitek Tracz. It was also a startup in that it was trying a brand new business model, a brand new way of publishing using technology and was a small skunkworks team in a very crowded and hot office. Recognise this sort of environment? It was also definitely a startup in that if it wasn’t immediately successful we knew we’d be looking for other things to do. 

What was different about this journal. Well for starters it was designed to be an online journal first and foremost. The print publication was merely there to act as an advertisement for the online content. The print was also there as a social object. We didn’t have Jyri’s great definition back then but we knew we needed something other than just URLs that people could pass around. The major difference though was the mode in which the research papers were published; Open Access. 

Open Access breaks the traditional model of publishing science research; the broken model where scientists give their research to journals for free, and in return for the journal peer reviewing them and printing them on a dead tree, give them a license to print money selling the research back to them. GenomeBiology was to be the first journal designed to deliver its research paper content via OpenAccess, where the publisher guarantees free access to the peer-reviewed research published within its journal to all. It was the vision laid out in Harald Varmus’ e-Biomed proposal. GenomeBiology was to recoup the editorial cost for peer review by charging subscriptions on the non-research content, a so called hybrid model, with this revenue being topped up by advertising both on the web and within the print magazine. It was so radical at first that we had to put this FAQ item on the website.

The core team was in place, it was 3 of us at first, and Theo Bloom, the editor and I spent a crazy few days in Washington talking to the NIH/NCBI/NLM crew about how we’d deposit the articles when they came in. Theo’s first editorial in the first issue set the scene perfectly (note the “cool URI” which has never changed).

“The ways in which scientific information is exchanged and distributed are also changing profoundly. Desktop internet access is widespread, and there is a strong feeling in the scientific community that publishers should move back to being the servants of science rather than posing expensive obstacles in the way of publishing original research. This feeling was voiced clearly last year by then National Institutes of Health Director, Harold Varmus, when he proposed “a community-based effort to establish an electronic publishing … system that would make results from the world’s life sciences research community freely available on the Internet”. The proposal has now become a reality: a pilot PubMed Central website and repository are available and several high-profile journals have signed up to place their research papers in it. Genome Biology is proud to be the first journal that, from its inception, will place all research articles in full in PubMed Central without delay, to allow immediate free access.”

Just about this time nine years ago I think I was either sleeping or heading off with the BioMedCentral team (I was the Information Architect for both GenomeBiology and BioMedCentral) to the Oracle conference in Europe just after we’d sent the print edition off to the printers. I was the technologist, the designer, the DBA and the print layout person for the first edition, such is the way with a startup. I’m happy to say that nine years on a lot of the information design and some of the logos, icons and design elements I designed back then are still in use. 

So why tell you this now. Why nine years later. Well, a few reasons. Firstly, I still have a lot of love for the magazine and for open access as an idea, manifesto and principle. It’s clearly past the toddler phase now, some amazing things have happened. Last year BioMedCentral sold showing that there is clearly a market for open access publishers. 

Also, this last week I’ve seen a couple of things which made me proud to have been there at the birth of a movement. First of all in the latest issue of US Wired there was an article about “The New Socialism” namechecks another, albeit younger, Open Access publisher Public Library of Science as being part of “Socialism a History”. Then the other day I saw this in of all places one of the free papers given out at train stations in London.

You know Open Access is working when not only does UCL adopt it for all its research, but also when the news story makes it into a free newspaper given to commuters. And no, it wasn’t a slow news day, lots of the British cabinet were resigning. 

There’s one more thing though. We’re working on something else open to do with science at the moment. It’s another secret skunkworks project. It in many ways shares some of the pioneering spirit and keeping things out of the hands of publishers ethos. It’s also to do with opening up and keeping open something quite key in the ecosystem of doing/funding and publishing science. We should have a private beta up soon and we’ll be announcing it all here in a few day’s time.

I don’t think we’ll read about it in a free newspaper necessarily, but then nine years ago we may not have believed we were doing something so profound, but in lots of ways I think we always knew we were.