Medical Illustrations » Open Access and Medical Art

Medical Illustrations » Open Access and Medical Art 

Open Access and Medical Art

Posted under Open Access

With the growing interest in open access, no-cost, medical journals, such as Open Medicine and PLoS Medicine, I’m drawn to wonder what the open access publishing movement means for medical illustrators?

Open access publications operate under the Creative Commons license, which proposes that individuals are able to copy, download, reprint, reuse, distribute, display or perform the published work, free of charge, with the only condition that they cite the origin of the published work.

Author’s with an academic affiliation are able to publish journal articles because they are financially supported by their home institutions. The author’s salary likely comes with conditions that encourage (read expect) them to publish, and publish often. While authors do not get paid (by the journal) to submit articles, they are of paid to write - they are provided a salary by their home institution, which provides them time to do and report on their research.

Ever wonder how much an “average” journal article costs to write? You could start with the average salary for a professor in a medical school is $85,241 / year (as suggested by salary.com). Let’s further assume the person is hard-working and puts in 50 hours a week, or 2450 hours a year if they take few weeks off to enjoy some holiday cheer. The hourly rate for this salary would then work out to $35/hour. Now the challenging part - estimating how long it takes to write, edit, submit, review, revise, re-edit, and resubmit a paper. There is also the issue of multiple authors to cloud the issue. However, even assuming a paper takes ONLY 150 hours to bring from raw data to published study - the cost easily exceeds $5000.

So the author(s) publish their paper, after spending over $5000 worth of time - and the article is available for free to the academic community. There are tremendous benefits to the rapid and wide dissemination of medical information that the open access system provides. Usually the research is paid for by public funds - so the information should be widely available (ideally to everyone who paid for it).

But when the author(s) recognize the value of medical illustrations - they will want to include quality medical images in their article. There are a couple common options. Perhaps the researchers have a medical illustrator available at their home institution - because their institution has recognized the value of providing this valuable resource, which improves publication quality and overall impact of the institution. Alternatively, the author(s) have to pay an independent illustrator to prepare artwork to be incorporated into the article. The later situation takes money out of the authors pocket, or more likely - out of their research grant).

In Canada, the costs associated with the development of web pages, multimedia presentations, and artwork for publications, or information dissemination, are all eligible expenses for research grants awarded by CIHR and NSERC.

Regardless of the way the medical illustrations are paid (internally or by a grant) the Creative Commons License does provide the opportunity to put conditions on the transfer of copyright. Most importantly - there can be a condition on the work restricting its future use for commercial gain. For example, the journal Open Medicine, publishes their articles under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada license. The author and artist are therefore able to protect their rights to the investment made in the development of a published illustration.

Initially I was concerned that open access publishing might reduce the opportunities for publishing medical illustrations, but after exploring the issue further - there seems to be great opportunity here. If the costs for publishing are reduced, more articles are able to be published and distributed more widely - then medical artists will have increased opportunities. Also - the electronic formats of open access journals also increases the opportunity for including multimedia and animation content, expanding the publishing possibilities. It’s a brave new world, indeed.

Food for thought:

CIHR Policy on Access to Research Outputs.

“CIHR considers the cost of publishing in open access journals to be an eligible expense under the Use of Grant Funds.” A good place to discover and note if CIHR does also accept artwork development as an eligible expense.

Blog post about CIHR open-access support

Directory of Open Access Journals

CMAJ congratulates colleagues at Open Medicine and … Open Medicine responds.

Medical Illustrations » Open Access and Medical Art