BioMed Central Blog

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  The intention is to reduce the loss suffered by the research community when such results remain unpublished.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)

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