Innovation in Journal Publishing: Some thoughts from BioMed Central

Deborah Kahn Publishing Director, BioMed Central

Some background on BioMed Central



An open access publisher

– No subscription barriers to research – Journal costs covered by • Article processing charges – Typically paid by author's funder/institution, sometimes by the author • Direct institutional support of journal

BMC journal portfolio

 199 journals (and growing….) • All peer-reviewed • Archived in PubMed Central, INIST and other international archives • 59 have impact factors, another 24 are tracked for inclusion • Searchable and retrievable • Articles are included in PubMed, Scopus, Google, CrossRef, Scirus • Some journals – Indexed in MEDLINE, Biosis (all biology titles), CAS – Tracked by Thomson-Reuters for Impact Factors

BMC journals are not so different from ‘traditional’ journals

   All journals are peer-reviewed All journals have Editors (either in house or external) All journals have Editorial/Advisory Boards

But then again, we are also different

Wide choice of file types

     Manuscript – Word, Word Perfect, RTF, PDF, LaTeX, DVI, Publicon Figures – EPS, PDF, PNG, Word, PPT, TIFF, JPG, BMP, CDX, TGF Reaction schemes – TGF, CDX Additional files – Any!

– Excellent support for video files Mini-websites – Zip file containing an index.html file

Full text

Final product MathML

Full text Video Mini-websites

Article tracking

  Authors can track their manuscript(s) through the publishing process – My BioMed Central combines information on manuscript for which you are an editor, author or peer reviewer BioMed Central’s integrated system maintains single history files for all manuscripts – Histories for transferred manuscripts are linked

Citations and downloads

• “Senior authors believe downloads to be more

credible measure of the usefulness of research then traditional citations.”

•

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ciber/ciber_2005_survey_final.pdf

•“Open access articles receive 50% more full-

text accesses and PDF downloads than subscription-access articles.”

• Kenneth R. Fulton, PNAS Publisher

Article statistics

   Author can track downloads – Via My BioMed Central – receives email x months after publication, detailing download statistics Highly accessed articles are flagged with Coming soon … – cited by, Citeulike, blogged

Going (more than) one step further…

Completing the scientific record Avoiding bias, wasted time and effort; freeing the “dark data” Unlimited space for complete reporting

Access to raw data

 Some concerns         Patient privacy Time constraints Space constraints Mistakes identified Alternative analysis may have commercial value Loss of intellectual property Risk of misinterpretation How to incentivise authors to deposit their data

Continuing discussions

 Agree and support universal standards  Data already needs to be fit for analysis  Third party repositories; change journal/publisher  Encourage better research practices  Embargoes and/or access clearance  Who really owns the data?

 Subsequent papers subject to same standards

Web 2.0/Social networking

     Twitter Facebook Blogging Patient information Commenting

Thank you

[email protected]