BioMed Central Blog

Welcoming SpringerOpen - a new series of open access journals

Springer Science+Business Media, BioMed Central's parent company and one of the world's largest Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) publishers, today announced a significant expansion of its open access publishing activity with the launch of SpringerOpen (www.springeropen.com), a new series of open access journals that will span all STM disciplines. Articles published in SpringerOpen journals will be freely and immediately accessible online, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

BioMed Central became part of Springer in 2008, and BioMed Central’s open access publishing expertise and technology is helping Springer to launch this new series of titles, which will extend the benefits of open access publishing to authors and readers across all disciplines. BioMed Central’s Open Access Membership scheme, offered to institutions, societies, funders and corporations, will be extended to include the SpringerOpen titles. Articles published in SpringerOpen journals will also be sent automatically to participating institutional repositories via BioMed Central's automated SWORD deposit mechanism.

The SpringerOpen journals will complement Springer's existing titles and BioMed Central’s growing portfolio of 200+ open access journals in medicine and life science. The first SpringerOpen journals, which will open for submissions shortly, are:

• Planetary Science
• Global Energy
• Journal of Mathematical Neuroscience
• Health Economics Review
• Journal of Mathematics in Industry
• Journal of Remanufacturing
• Environmental Sciences Europe
• Security and Intelligence Informatics
• Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology Express
• Bulletin of Mathematical Sciences
• Gold Bulletin
• Psychology and Well-Being Research

It was also announced today that Springer has become a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publisher's Association (OASPA).

For the latest news about SpringerOpen, sign up for email updates via the SpringerOpen website or follow @SpringerOpen on Twitter.

BioMed Central is hugely excited by this collaboration with our Springer colleagues, which has potential to greatly extend the success of the open access publishing model, and we look forward to supporting the ongoing development of the SpringerOpen portfolio with continued evolution and improvement of our open access publishing platform, which is rapidly becoming the preferred choice for a wide range of scholarly and society journals.

Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 20:20    Comments (1)

Planning financing for open access

Last week, Universities UK and JISC held a conference to educate senior university managers about the importance of open access to institutions, how to develop policies and plan financing.
 
A report presented at the conference demonstrates that a single large university could contribute around £3 million each year to the UK research community as a whole simply by sharing knowledge through a more open route.

Indeed, many UK universities and higher education colleges are already exploring open access, but the report suggests more could and should be done in the next five years to make open access the preferred route for publishing research. In turn, it is expected this will increase the competitiveness and creativity of the UK.

However the costs and benefits of an open access policy may well fall unequally across individual institutions. There may also be implications for institutional repository use, open access publication funds and open access policies.

To this end the Research Communications Strategy (University of Nottingham) is hosting a series of free workshops this summer. The series, led by consultant Alma Swan, is aimed at institutions' research support officers, financial modellers and repository managers or administrators. These events will take place in Glasgow, London, Birmingham and Leeds from 15-29 July.

More information about open access and central funds can be found on our website. We have also published case studies of institutions which have successfully implemented central funds, including the University of Nottingham. 

Posted by Charlotte Webber at 10:35    Comments (0)