BMC is:
- Part of the Current Science Group, which has offices in Philadelphia, London and Tokyo and has established a strong reputation for biomedical publishing - in print and through the Internet
- An independent publishing house committed to providing immediate free access to peer-reviewed biomedical research
- Committed to ensuring efficient and effective quality control through full and stringent peer review
- A publisher of a wide variety of journals and other services
- Intending to have all BioMed Central journals citation-tracked, and establish impact factors
- Encouraging self-archiving by authors
BMC promises:
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Authors keep the copyright of their own articles
- All BMC journals are publicly archived with National Institute of Health's PubMed Central
- All BMC articles are indexed in PubMed
- BMC is prevented from selling successful open-access journals to another publisher that does not promise ongoing open-access
Practical advantages for authors:
- Work will be accessible to anyone at any time and anywhere without the need of a subscription and without any charge
- Work will be published in the journal and included immediately in PubMed
- You retain the copyright of your work, so you stay in control
- Your work is more likely to be cited, since it will be freely available to the entire global science community
- You will be able to view your article's access statistics, which average at over 200 downloads per month per article
- Your papers will be securely and permanently archived in PubMed Central
Idealism expressed by authors:
We are indeed in the middle of a crisis in scholarly publishing, but the current system of publishing is conservative and well entrenched. Any attempt to change it requires a great deal of momentum.
That momentum was started in 2001 with an open letter to scientists, asking them to endorse something called the Public Library of Science. It was a grassroots effort to start moving this publishing behemoth. It asked scientists to only publish in, subscribe to, and work for, journals that supported free and wide access to their work, and to have the articles publicly archived for the good of humanity. Not surprisingly, it was signed by a large number of Cornellians.
While some argue that the Public Library of Science proposal was overly idealistic and doomed to failure from the start, others believe that many researchers would support the endeavor if there were viable outlets for their work. The Cornell University Library has been working on providing alternatives to scholarly publishing that reduce our dependence on commercial publishers. Since publishing is based on the culture of each discipline, it is believed that multiple-solutions and some experimentation is in order. Preprint servers for physicists may not work for molecular biologists.
One publisher, BioMed Central, has flipped the subscription model around, charging authors to publish in BioMed Central journals, but providing free access to all readers. The cost to publish in BMC journals is set at $500/article, comparable to page charges that are already levied by society publishers. To encourage scientists to experiment with these journals, the Cornell University Library has begun an institutional subscription to BioMed Central, meaning that the $500 fee is waived for all Cornell-authored articles. In addition, interested communities can start new journals using the BioMed Central online system
Where to start as an author:
- To overcome any doubts, read your colleague's experiences
A sample comment from an author of a neighboring institution follows:
"We appreciate the speed with which you handled our paper. From our experience BioMed Central works. We now look forward to seeing this article turn up in our PubMed searches with instantaneous free availability of the complete article in PubMed Central."
Harold Varmus
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, USA
Testimonials by Weill Cornell Researchers:
"We have published two articles in BMC Neuroscience from the Sackler Institute, Department of Psychiatry. They were both reviewed rapidly with excellent suggestions and both have had a large number of readers on the web. We were happy to support the open access feature of BMC."
Mike Posner
Director Sackler Institute
Dept. of Psychiatry
