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Parent company | Springer Nature |
---|---|
Status | Active |
Founded | 2000 |
Founder | Current Science Group |
Headquarters location | London, WC1 United Kingdom |
Distribution | Open access |
Publication types | Scientific journals |
Nonfiction topics | Science |
Official website | www |
BioMed Central (BMC) is a United Kingdom-based, for-profit scientific open access publisher that produces over 250 scientific journals. All its journals are published online only. BioMed Central describes itself as the first and largest open access science publisher. It was founded in 2000 and has been owned by Springer, now Springer Nature, since 2008.
BioMed Central was founded in 2000 as part of the Current Science Group (now Science Navigation Group, SNG), a nursery of scientific publishing companies. SNG chairman Vitek Tracz developed the concept for the company after NIH director Harold Varmus's PubMed Central concept for open-access publishing was scaled back. [1] The first director of the company was Jan Velterop. Chemistry Central was established in 2006 and the PhysMath Central journal imprint in 2007.
In 2002, the company introduced article processing charges, [2] and these have since been the primary source of revenue. In 2007, Yale University Libraries stopped subsidizing BioMed Central article processing charges for Yale researchers. [3]
In October 2008, it was announced that BioMed Central (along with Chemistry Central and PhysMath Central) had been acquired by Springer Science+Business Media, the second largest STM publisher. [4] The Chemistry Central and PhysMath Central brands have since been retired.
In November 2008, BioMed Central became an official supporting organisation of Healthcare Information For All. [5]
Following the merger of BMC into Springer Nature, BMC journals were gradually converted to the general Springer Nature software. The software migration meant the loss of several features, often related to open science requirements, like the ability to download a machine-readable version of the paper (in XML format), direct download of PDF files and the ability to read articles without cookies. [6]
BioMed Central's flagship journals include BMC Bioinformatics , BMC Biology , BMC Medicine , Genome Biology and Genome Medicine . It also produces the BMC Series of journals covering the fields of biology and medicine. Most of the other journals published by BioMed Central are owned and produced independently by societies and academic editorial boards, with BioMed Central providing the hosting, publishing platform and marketing.
All journals are published online; some of the flagship journals have in the past also been available as print subscriptions, such as Arthritis Research & Therapy . Publications in BioMed Central journals are, immediately upon publication, released under the Creative Commons "Attribution" license which grants permission to reuse publications and produce derivative work. The only exceptions to this (as of 2010) were the flagship journals, which reserved rights on review and commentary content; those articles were available to purchase on a subscription or on a pay-per-view basis, becoming freely available (but not fully open access) to all after six months; however, as of January 2015, "no subscription fees apply to these journals or to any articles published in them." [7]
In 2001, BioMed Central was the first publisher to carry out open peer review as default, by openly posting named peer reviewer reports alongside published articles as part of a 'pre-publication history' for all medical journals in the BMC series. As of 2020 [update] , 70 BMC journals were operating fully open peer review. [8]
The BMC Series is a collection of several dozen online research journals published by BioMed Central. [9] Like all other BioMed Central journals, they have a policy of open access to the research articles they publish. Between them, they cover all major subject areas within biology and medicine. Two of the journals, BMC Biology and BMC Medicine , have a broad scope, and aim to publish particularly significant research. A third journal, BMC Research Notes, publishes scientifically valid research outputs that cannot be considered as full research or methodology articles across all scientific and clinical disciplines, [10] while BMC Proceedings publishes conference proceedings. The other journals specialise on a particular subject area. Due to their free licensing, images from BMC journals can be reused in other places.
Most BMC Series journals have an impact factor. As of 2016, for the 53 journals with impact factors, BMC Biology had the highest at 7.98. [11]
The company also has hosted biomedical databases, including the ISRCTN registry (previously Current Controlled Trials), a Primary Registry of clinical trials in the WHO Registry Network. [12] The Biology Image Library and the Cases Database, a database of medical case reports, [13] were closed in 2014. [14] The company also provided hosting for institutional repositories of publications based on the DSpace platform under the brand Open Repository. [15] The Open Repository activity was sold to Atmire in 2016. [16]
PLOS is a nonprofit publisher of open-access journals in science, technology, and medicine and other scientific literature, under an open-content license. It was founded in 2000 and launched its first journal, PLOS Biology, in October 2003.
In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset version available free, before or after a paper is published in a journal.
MEDLINE is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care. MEDLINE also covers much of the literature in biology and biochemistry, as well as fields such as molecular evolution.
A public health journal is a scientific journal devoted to the field of public health, including epidemiology, biostatistics, and health care. Public health journals, like most scientific journals, are peer-reviewed. Public health journals are commonly published by health organizations and societies, such as the Bulletin of the World Health Organization or the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. Many others are published by a handful of large publishing corporations that includes Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer Science+Business Media, and Informa, each of which has many imprints. Many societies partner with such corporations to handle the work of producing their journals.
F1000 is an open research publisher for scientists, scholars, and clinical researchers. F1000 offers a different research evaluation service from standard academic journals by offering peer-review after, rather than before, publishing a research article. Initially, F1000 was named after the 1,000 faculty members that performed peer-reviews, but over time F1000 expanded to more than 8,000 members. When F1000 was acquired by Taylor & Francis Group in January 2020, it kept the publishing services. F1000Prime and F1000 Workspace were acquired by different brands.
PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), PubMed Central is more than a document repository. Submissions to PMC are indexed and formatted for enhanced metadata, medical ontology, and unique identifiers which enrich the XML structured data for each article. Content within PMC can be linked to other NCBI databases and accessed via Entrez search and retrieval systems, further enhancing the public's ability to discover, read and build upon its biomedical knowledge.
Libertas Academica (LA) is an open access academic journal publisher specializing in the biological sciences and clinical medicine. It was acquired by SAGE Publications in September 2016.
BioModels is a free and open-source repository for storing, exchanging and retrieving quantitative models of biological interest created in 2006. All the models in the curated section of BioModels Database have been described in peer-reviewed scientific literature.
Europe PubMed Central is an open-access repository that contains millions of biomedical research works. It was known as UK PubMed Central until 1 November 2012.
BMC Biology is an online open access scientific journal that publishes original, peer-reviewed research in all fields of biology, together with opinion and comment articles. The publication was established in 2003. The journal is part of a series of BMC journals published by the UK-based publisher BioMed Central, owned by Springer Nature. The journal has an international editorial board of researchers and editorial offices in London and New York.
Open peer review is the various possible modifications of the traditional scholarly peer review process. The three most common modifications to which the term is applied are:
Clinical Proteomics is a peer-reviewed open access medical journal published by BioMed Central. Covers scientific research in the field of translational proteomics with an emphasis on the application of proteomic technology to all aspects of clinical research. It was established in March 2004 and the editor in chief is Daniel W. Chan.
AllTrials is a project advocating that clinical research adopt the principles of open research. The project summarizes itself as "All trials registered, all results reported": that is, all clinical trials should be listed in a clinical trials registry, and their results should always be shared as open data.
An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making an academic work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. This fee may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder. Sometimes, publication fees are also involved in traditional journals or for paywalled content. Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice. An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a Creative Commons license.
Molecular Autism is a peer-reviewed open-access medical journal covering research on the cause, biology, and treatment of autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders.
Vitek Tracz is a London-based entrepreneur who has been involved in science publishing, pharmaceutical information and mobile phone-based navigation.
The idea and practise of providing free online access to journal articles began at least a decade before the term "open access" was formally coined. Computer scientists had been self-archiving in anonymous ftp archives since the 1970s and physicists had been self-archiving in arXiv since the 1990s. The Subversive Proposal to generalize the practice was posted in 1994.
Juniper Publishers is a publisher of various academic journals. It has a postal address in Irvine, California, USA, located in a residential neighborhood but has employees in Hyderabad, India. Juniper Publishers has been included on Beall's List of potential predatory open-access publishers, and has faced other criticisms of its publishing practices.
JSci Med Central is a publisher of various academic journals from Hyderabad, India. JSciMed Central has been included on Beall's List of potential predatory open-access publishers, and has faced other criticisms of its publishing practices.
This "Further reading" section may need cleanup.(January 2015) |
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