BioMed Central Blog
BioMed
Central is proud to announce the launch of BMC
Medical Physics, the latest addition to its successful BMC series of journals. This journal will be guided by an all new Editorial Board and will publish research on the latest advances in medical physics.
[Read More]
Posted by Neil Macpherson at 09:58 Comments (2)
Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases was recently accepted for tracking by Thomson Reuters. It is included in the ISI Web of Knowledge database and will receive its first impact factor this summer. We are delighted with this
achievement, which confirms the prominence and reputation which Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases has achieved in its field.
The journal was launched in 2006 and has since published a wide range of open access articles concerning rare diseases and orphan drugs. Overseen by Ségolène Aymé, Bruno Dallapiccola and Dian Donnai, the journal is the official publication of Orphanet, the European portal for rare diseases and orphan drugs.
Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases is one of eleven BioMed Central titles that are due to receive their first impact factors in June 2008; a full list of all of the BioMed Central journals that are indexed by Thomson Reuters is available from our website.Posted by Charlotte Hubbard at 17:04 Comments (0)
Molecular Cytogenetics - a new journal from BioMed Central
We
are pleased to announce the launch of Molecular Cytogenetics, a
new open access, independent journal, which encompasses all aspects of
chromosome biology and the application of molecular cytogenetic techniques in
all areas of biomedicine.
Molecular Cytogenetics represents
the first open access source for research concerning molecular cytogenetic
techniques, and aims to provide an international scientific platform for
researchers in the field. Details regarding topical areas of interest for Molecular
Cytogenetics can be found on the journal 'About' page. To
keep abreast with the latest developments of this exciting new journal, please register to receive
regular alerts
Thomas Liehr (Institute of Human Genetics and Anthropology), Lisa Shaffer (Signature Genomic Laboratories), and Yuri Yurov (National Research Center of Mental Health), Editors-in-Chief of Molecular Cytogenetics, are supported by an international Editorial Board.
Please read the launch Editorial for further information about the journal.
Lisa Phelps
Assistant Editor – Independent Journals
Posted by Alison Cobb at 13:12 Comments (1)
Winners of the 2007 BioMed Central Research Awards
The winners of the 2007 BioMed Central Research Awards were announced yesterday. Shortlisted authors, who travelled from as far afield as Germany, Italy and the US, joined science journalists, eminent researchers, open access advocates, publishers and editors for a ceremony at the Royal Society of Medicine last night. The BioMed Central Research Awards recognise and celebrate the best medical and biological research published in BioMed Central’s open access journals.
Guests at the awards ceremony were treated to an entertaining talk on natural history and biodiversity preservation from Henry Nicholls, journalist and author. Nicholls discussed his experiences with the rarest animal in the world today, the giant tortoise known as Lonesome George.
Dr Markus Ralser won the prize for biological research. His research, ‘Dynamic rerouting of the carbohydrate flux is key to counteracting oxidative stress’ was published in Journal of Biology. Dr Xiaolong Meng received the award for medicine. Meng’s research ‘Endometrial regenerative cells: A novel stem cell population’ was published in Journal of Translational Medicine. Both these awards were generously sponsored by Microsoft Research.
This year there was a new addition to the awards, the JMCR Award, presented to the author of the most original case report published in the Journal of Medical Case Reports. Dr Phuong Mai won the award for her case report: ‘A possible new syndrome with growth-hormone secreting pituitary adenoma, colonic polyposis, lipomatosis, lentigines and renal carcinoma in association with familial testicular germ cell malignancy: A case report'.
Congratulations to the winners and to those shortlisted for the awards, and thanks to Pfizer, whose provided sponsorship for the awards ceremony itself.
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 18:03 Comments (0)
Breast Cancer Research celebrates its tenth anniversary
Breast Cancer Research is celebrating its tenth birthday, and Professor Sir Bruce Ponder, Editor-in-Chief, has published an editorial to commemorate the event, detailing the progress of the journal to date, and looking forwards to the future.
The editorial will feature on a special edition CD-ROM that will highlight some of our most popular articles from the past ten years. We will be giving away these CD-ROMs at the American Association for Cancer Research 2008 annual meeting – come along and visit the BioMed Central stand at booth 923 to pick up your free copy.
Breast Cancer Research is an international, peer-reviewed online journal, publishing original research, reviews, commentaries and reports. The journal has an Impact Factor of 4.16. Submit your next paper to Breast Cancer Research and you could contribute to the success of the journal over the next decade.
Frances Mulvany
In-house Editor, Breast Cancer Research
Posted by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz at 15:45 Comments (0)
Improved support for additional material files - "mini-websites"
With the upcoming launch of BMC Research Notes (which will have a strong data focus) BioMed Central's development team has been hard at work improving the handling of additional material files.
One request we have had from authors is to make it possible to upload collections of files that can be conveniently navigated in the web browser - essentially a miniature website associated with the article. This functionality has now been added to our publication system.
To submit such a 'mini-website' as an additional material file, all you need to do is to ensure that the homepage is named index.html, and sits in the root folder of the content you wish to submit. Then convert the folder hierarchy into a ZIP archive, and upload this ZIP file using the regular manuscript submission system, which will recognize and process it automatically. Full guidelines are provided in each journal's Instructions for Authors (example).
Readers of the published article will have a choice of whether to download the ZIP file to view locally on their own machine, or alternatively they can follow a link to view the contents of the ZIP file via the BioMed Central website.
Several articles already published by BioMed Central have included such mini-website zipfiles, and the data for these articles have been converted to take advantage of the functionality. See for example Additional File 1 from the following article in BMC Evolutionary Biology:
Research article
Natural hybridization in heliconiine butterflies: the species boundary as a continuum
Mallet J, Beltrán M, Neukirchen W, Linares M
BMC Evolutionary Biology 2007, 7:28 (23 February 2007)
[Abstract] [Full text] [PDF]
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 19:06 Comments (0)
Bruce Ponder, Editor-in-Chief of Breast Cancer Research, receives knighthood
Bruce Ponder, Editor-in-Chief of Breast Cancer Research, has been recognised with a knighthood in the 2008 New Year's honours list for services to medicine. Sir Bruce is Li Ka Shing Professor of Oncology at Cambridge University and Director of the newly-opened Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute, where he continues to carry out research on genetic susceptibility to cancer.
He launched Breast Cancer Research with BioMed Central in July 1999. Breast Cancer Research is an international, peer-reviewed online journal, publishing original research, reviews, commentaries and reports. The journal has an Impact Factor of 4.16.
Congratulations to Sir Bruce from all at BioMed Central.
Frances Mulvany
In-house Editor, Breast Cancer Research
Posted by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz at 18:32 Comments (0)
Help is at hand for those whose thirst for all things open access is not fully satisfied by BioMed Central's website and YouTube channel. Last month I was interviewed by Sundar Raman, host of the "Open Views" slot on KRUU, which describes itself as an "Open Radio" station, in Fairfield, Iowa.
The podcast of the interview, is now available from the KRUU website.
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 11:39 Comments (0)
BMC Research Notes - completing the scientific record
BioMed Central is pleased to
announce the forthcoming launch of the newest addition to the BMC series of
journals, BMC Research Notes, which will begin to accept submissions in
early 2008.
Journals
are increasingly concerned with citations and impact factors, and it can be
difficult for researchers and clinicians to publish valuable work that may not
be highly cited. At the same time,
science and medicine are becoming increasingly evidence-based and transparent.
The goal of BMC Research Notes is to provide a home for short publications,
case series, incremental updates to previous work, results of individual
experiments and similar material that currently lack a suitable outlet. The intention is to reduce the loss suffered
by the research community when such results remain unpublished.
In
clinical research, the prospective registration of randomized controlled trials
has become a reality, whilst in the field of genomic research, scientists
deposit large volumes of data into publicly accessible databases for the entire
community to use.
A key objective of BMC Research Notes is to ensure that
associated data files will, wherever possible, be published in standard,
reusable formats and are exposed to ensure that they are searchable and easily
harvested for reuse. We are working with researchers across the full spectrum
of biomedical research to define appropriate recommendations for
domain-specific data file standards, and we aim to provide detailed 'Additional
data file' preparation guidelines, to complement our current detailed figure
preparation guidelines.
BMC Research Notes will publish scientifically
sound research across all fields of biology and medicine, enabling authors to
publish updates to previous research, software tools and databases, data sets,
small-scale clinical studies, and reports of confirmatory or ‘negative’
results. Additionally the journal will
welcome descriptions of incremental improvements to methods that as well as
short correspondence items and hypotheses. Submissions will be fully peer-reviewed,
and will be handled by an international board of academic Associate Editors
spanning all biological and medical disciplines.
We are looking for enthusiastic researchers
who would like to have an editorial involvement with BMC Research Notes. We are particularly keen to hear from
researchers who have a special interest in data sharing and data format
standardization.
Please let us know if you would like to play a role with this important new journal, and do tell us if you know of any other researchers who you feel should be involved.
Posted by Matt Hodgkinson at 16:40 Comments (3)
BioMed Central YouTube channel debuts
We're pleased to announce the launch of our new BioMed Central YouTube channel, which brings together videos of our authors and editors talking about their work, BioMed Central's journals, and the benefits of open access publishing.
Video is an increasingly important way for researchers to
communicate their results, and BioMed Central is at the forefront of
developments in this area. We encourage authors and editors to upload suitable
videos to YouTube and contact us
so that
we can add these videos to the BioMed Central channel. If you want to know when
we post new videos, just click the 'Subscribe' link on the channel
home page.
In addition to our YouTube channel, we are working with SciVee to ensure the visibility and linking of PubCasts featuring BioMed Central articles. For example, SciVee currently features a pubcast by Apostol Gramada in which he describes the research he published in BMC Bioinformatics.
BioMed Central also offers perhaps the best and most fully integrated support for video content within research articles of any scientific publisher. Thumbnails are displayed for any video files associated with an article, and these videos can be played back within the context of the article.
Examples of the diverse recent BioMed Central articles making use of this support for embedded video include:
We encourage and support authors who wish to publish video-enhanced
articles, and to this end we have recently doubled the maximum file
size for additional material files to 20 megabytes (using modern video
standard such as MP4, this is sufficient for several minutes of high
quality video).
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 17:52 Comments (1)
Six more BioMed Central journals accepted for inclusion in MEDLINE
We are pleased to announce that the following six BioMed Central titles have recently been accepted for inclusion in MEDLINE:
- Head and Face Medicine
- Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation
- Journal of Translational Medicine
- Radiation Oncology
- Substance Abuse, Treatment, Prevention and Policy
- World Journal of Surgical Oncology
The journals were accepted for inclusion following review by the Literature Selection
Technical Review Committee, an NIH-chartered advisory committee of external
experts. The inclusion of these titles
is a strong indicator of their growing stature in their respective fields, and the quality of the articles they have published to date.
In addition, a number of BioMed Central journals have recently been accepted for inclusion in BIOSIS and Zoological Record. For more information, see BioMed Central's journal indexing information page.
Posted by Charlotte Hubbard at 18:52 Comments (0)
Announcing the launch of Journal of Biological Engineering
We are pleased to
announce the launch of Journal of Biological Engineering, a new, open access, independent journal, which covers
all aspects of biological engineering. The journal is the official publication of the Institute of Biological Engineering.
Biological engineering is an emerging discipline that encompasses engineering theory and practice connected to and derived from the science of biology, just as mechanical engineering and electrical engineering are rooted in physics, and chemical engineering in chemistry. Journal of Biological Engineering aims to be a home for articles covering the breadth and depth of biological engineering and addressing the foundational questions that unify all applications of biological engineering.
Dr Mark Riley, the journal’s Editor-in-Chief and Associate Professor at the University of Arizona’s Department of Agricultural & Biosystems Engineering, is supported by an expert Editorial Board.
For more information about the journal, please read the launch editorial.Posted by Charlotte Hubbard at 14:12 Comments (1)
Journal of Medical Case Reports publishes its 100th case report
We
are delighted to announce the publication of the 100th case report in Journal of Medical Case Reports.
The 100th article is “Pulmonary
cystic disease in HIV positive individuals in the Democratic Republic of Congo:
three case reports” by Steven Callens and colleagues, and was published
just over seven months after the journal’s launch. This is a fantastic
achievement for JMCR and highlights the journal’s immediate popularity
as a dedicated, open access home for case reports.
Case reports – which are often overlooked by mainstream journals - are important in communicating new and unusual clinical findings, including early reports of new and emerging diseases, and reports of rare side-effects of new medications, as Professor Michael Kidd, the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, explains in his video interview. All case reports published in the journal will be aggregated into a structured case reports database. The database will also draw content from other sources, making it possible to search for example, for patterns of drug reactions, hopefully driving future research.
The journal welcomes submissions of case reports from any area of medicine, which contribute to expanding medical knowledge. If you haven't already, why not submit your next case report to Journal of Medical Case Reports.
Posted by Charlotte Hubbard at 18:17 Comments (0)
Algorithms for Molecular Biology tracked by Thomson Scientific, Impact Factor due next year
We are pleased to announce that Algorithms for Molecular Biology has been
accepted for tracking by Thomson Scientific and is now on course to receive its
first impact factor in June 2008. The journal has also been included in the indexing BIOSIS.
The journal was launched at the start of 2006 and we are delighted that it has been picked up for tracking at such an early stage by Thomson Scientific. This is a noteworthy indication of the success of the journal to date. Congratulations to the Editors-in-Chief, Burkhard Morgenstern and Peter Stadler on their achievement.
Posted by Charlotte Hubbard at 18:15 Comments (0)
Holger Schünemann joins Health and Quality of Life Outcomes as Editor-in-Chief
Professor Holger Schünemann from the Italian National Cancer Institute has recently been appointed as Editor-in-Chief of Health and Quality of Life Outcomes. Sincere thanks go to the Professor Marcello Tamburini, who will be stepping down as Editor-in-Chief later this year, and whose hard work was essential for the journal’s strong reputation in the field.
The Editorial Board has been updated to include several new Associate Editors: Dr Elie Akl (University at Buffalo, United States), Dr Chih-Hung Chang (Northwestern University), Dr Jeffrey Jutai (University of Western Ontario, Dr Guido Miccinesi (Center for the Study and Prevention of Cancer, Italy), Dr Milo Puhan (University of Zurich, Switzerland) and Dr Jeff Sloan (Mayo Medical School, USA).
Posted by Charlotte Hubbard at 18:09 Comments (0)