There will be smiles all-round at Reed Elsevier today, with the Anglo-Dutch publishing group expected to report annual profits of more than £1bn for the first time in its long history. Yet again a strong set of results from the group's scientific and legal publishing divisions will have made up for continuing weakness in Reed's business and education markets.
But storm clouds are gathering on the horizon. Reed's highly lucrative scientific publishing empire, which has a tradition stretching back to 1580, is under threat from the growth of a new system of publishing on the internet known as open access.
Traditional scientific publications work on the premise that institutions will pay subscriptions to receive journals that contain important research. Open access, in contrast, charges the authors of research for its publication. Authors pay between £300 and £800 per published article. Reading the journal online, however, is free.
Until now Reed has dismissed open access as an unsustainable business model which at its heart risks becoming mere vanity publishing. But in academic circles the move towards paid-for publication and free access is gaining speed. The stakes are high. The market for scientific publications is worth about $10bn to $11bn (£5.3bn to £5.8bn) a year and Reed's 1,800 journals have sales of about $2.2bn, making it one of the largest scientific publishers in the world.
In the US the Public Library of Science, a non-profitmaking organisation backed by a Nobel prize winner and an American charity, has hit the headlines, with a series of academic journals that charge scientists $1,500 for publication. This side of the Atlantic, BioMed Central publishes 107 open access journals in the biosciences and medical market and is expected to make a profit next year - five years after its launch.
Yesterday the Oxford University Press said its experiment, using the open access business model for its Nucleic Acids Research journal, has been "encouraging".
"We are delighted with the results of our experiment so far," said Martin Richardson, managing director of OUP's journals division. "And while open access remains a young and economically unproven model for publishing research, as a University Press we are keen to take a leading role in responding to the changing needs of the re search community." Finally, next month the issue of whether academic institutions should go on paying for scientific journals will be discussed by the science and technology committee of MPs who will grill executives from both Reed and rival Taylor & Francis.
Michael Mabe, Reed's director of academic relations, believes open access is still unproven. "I do not think that we have a closed mind about open access, our concern - and I think this is true for the publishing world in general - is that all alternative business models ... have to be self-sustaining. At the end of the day we have an industry that has been able to preserve the minutes of science for hundreds of years and if we are to replace it with another model the very least it has to do is be sustainable."
But Jan Velterop, publisher at BioMed Central, says he is very close to proving that open access can be made to work, and the margins are a lot lower than the ones Reed currently enjoys.
"The main difference between us and Reed is efficiency. Elsevier is cobbled together from a great many companies acquired over time. There is massive inefficiency in the system. We have started from complete scratch. We are a very much leaner and very much meaner machine."
He is also fed up with critics of open access likening it to vanity publishing. Traditional scientific journals - such as those produced by Reed - are put together through a system of peer review that uses other academics to look over research reports submitted for publication in order to gauge whether they are worthy of inclusion. Peer reviewers are not paid, but consider the job as prestigious.
The same process is followed by BioMed Central. "Every article that is published as open access in our journals is peer reviewed," says Mr Velterop. "It is absolutely not right to portray open access publishing as vanity publishing."
BioMed Central charges academics £280 to publish their articles so in theory the more articles it accepts the more it makes. But, Mr Velterop stresses, such an approach would quickly lead to its publications being treated as worthless by the research community. "We think that all the scientific publishing business will eventually go in this direction."