The UK's leading open access publisher, BioMed Central, has issued a hard-hitting riposte to what it calls the 'myths' that have emerged from the House of Commons select committee investigations into Scientific Journal Publishing.

The company has refuted claims by the Royal Society that the cost of open access will reduce the availability of funding for research, saying money is likely to move from library budgets into research budgets.

A company statement said: "It may well make sense for the costs of publishing to be incorporated into research funding grants, rather than being covered by library budgets."

The Royal Society has claimed it will need to find an extra £1.96m a year to fund articles published by its 300 University Research Fellows.

BioMed Central also launched a counter-attack to the oral evidence given by leading journal publishers at the hearings.

The companies delivered a concerted attack on open access, saying it threatens the integrity of the peer review process.

But open access vendors point to the price being paid for the current monopoly position publishers enjoy.

"In the old model, market forces do not apply, there is no real competition at all," BioMed Central marketing manager Natasha Robshaw said.

"If an article is published in a journal, you have to pay the price the publisher demands to get access to that journal. There's no competition."

Vitek Tracz, chairman of Current Science Group, which owns BioMed Central, told the committee: "You cannot go and say you will not buy this journal because it is expensive.

"The coin of exchange in science is not journals, it is the papers you read, and you cannot get them from any other sources than the publisher who publishes them."