ASBMB, Four Years Later
A one-time powerhouse society publisher has been brought low by a reckless dive into OA
In 2021, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) decided to make all its journals Gold OA and its archive Green OA. As part of this business model flip, ASBMB contracted with Elsevier for publishing services.
For those of us who remember the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) as one of the powerhouse, independent society journals — it launched HighWire Press and strutted confidently into the Digital Age with tons of innovations — the 2021 announcement was a striking moment, sad and pregnant with peril.
A few years on, how is ASBMB doing?
After all, the leader of the OA initiative at ASBMB at the time predicted [bolding mine] “[m]aking our journals fully open access is the right thing to do to advance science, but — as explained above — it will result in a substantial loss of revenue.”