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 inhouse 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 fulltext 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
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Twitter
Facebook
Blogging
Patient information
Commenting
Thank you
deborah.kahn@biomedcentral.com