BioMed Central Blog
White Rhino - a guest post from Writers Without Borders
This post is from Omar Khan and Tim Brookes of Writers Without Borders:
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Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 16:05 Comments (0)
Arthritis Research & Therapy – Accredited CME Webcast
BioMed Central has published its first CME (Continuing Medical Education) webcast, in Arthritis Research & Therapy.
Clinical Conundrum: Use of COX-2 Inhibitors, nsNSAIDs and ASA in Patients with Cardiovascular Risk provides education to meet the needs of primary care physicians and rheumatologists.
The webcast is presented by Vibeke Strand, MD, from Stanford University with William B. White, MD from the University of Connecticut and R. Andrew Moore, DSc from the University of Oxford in the UK.
Supported by an educational grant from Pfizer, the program is designed to help physicians maintain and develop their knowledge, skills and practice.
Learning objectives
- Discuss the cardiovascular risks associated with non-selective and selective NSAIDs
- Review and compare of data on the effects of aspirin therapy in conjunction with NSAID therapies
- Summarize the UGI complications associated with nsNSAIDs and selective NSAIDs and the impact of concomitant administration of ASA
- Analyze of the benefit/risk profile of CV vs. GI events and explain in patient terminology
To participate and claim one CME credit*, please click here <arthritis-research.com/webcast/art-w1/>, register, and follow the instructions on the CME Information page.
For further information about publishing webcasts with BioMed Central, please contact us <info@biomedcentral.com>.
* This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the Essential Areas and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education through the joint sponsorship of Medical Education Resources(http://www.mer.org/) and Innovations Consulting Group. Medical Education Resources is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.
Credit Designation
Medical Education Resources designates this educational activity for a maximum of 1.0 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should only claim credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
Posted by Charlotte Webber at 17:23 Comments (0)
Over the few years, the European Commission has undertaken an ongoing program of investigation into the issue of open access to the results of scientific research.
This included an influential report published in 2006, that looked at the economics of different models of scholarly system, and concluded that the traditional subscription-based system did not operate as an effective market, and that alternate models deserved to be explored. This report was followed by a conference on open access which took place in Brussels in 2007, and an extensive consultation process. Late last year, the new European Research Council announced that its grants would all be covered by a mandatory open access policy.
The latest and perhaps most significant development is the announcement of a pilot open access project in relation to the EC Seventh Research Framework Program (FP7) of funding. FP7 has a budget of just over €50bn and runs from 2007 to 2013. The mandatory policy will initially apply to a subset of fields amounting to about 20% of the total funding (i.e. €10bn). The fields that the pilot open access policy applies to are: health, energy, environment, parts of information and communication technologies, research infrastructures, social sciences and humanities, and science in society. Research grant recipients will be required to deposit open access copies of published articles into an appropriate repository, with a maximum delay of either 6 or 12 months depending on the subject area.
An important point, noted in the FAQ of the pilot program, is that this is not an 'unfunded mandate'. The FAQ confirms that funds are available to all FP7 grant recipients to cover the cost of publication in open access journals, and funding recipients are encouraged to take advantage of this option to allow their articles to be made openly available immediately, with no embargo period.
"[T]he Commission has taken the initiative to use FP7 grant agreements
to encourage grantees to take advantage of reimbursement for the full
cost of open access publishing so that their research articles can be
made available in open access mode as soon as they are published"
For more information on the latest funder policies on open access, see BioMed Central's Funder Policies page.
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 14:05 Comments (1)
How open access is your research area? (revisited)
Just over a year ago, this blog post introduced the concept of the Open Access Quotient, an easy-to-calculate metric for the fraction of the biomedical literature that is immediately freely accessible in full text form, for a given subject area.
Now seems as good a time as any to revisit this metric, to get a sense of what progress has been made in opening up the literature. Has the growth of open access publishing, and the strengthening of the NIH open access policy, had a measurable impact on the accessibility of research?
Looking at the biomedical literature has a whole, there has clearly been progress. The fraction of recent PubMed abstracts that will link the users straight through to the fulltext, with no permission barrier getting in the way, is up from 6.8% to 8.45%. There's still a long way to go, but that's a lot more immediate open access articles (about 1000 more per month, in fact).
Looking at particular topic areas, the results just as encouraging:
It is clear that open access is close to becoming the norm rather than the exception for publications in areas such as malaria and genomics, and the take-up of open access in these areas seems to still be growing fast, rather than showing any signs of plateauing. Just as encouraging is the doubling in the proportion of clinical trials publications that are now open access.
We will be sure to keep a close eye on how the OAQ for these fields, and PubMed as a whole, develops over the next 12 months.
[One caveat on the use of OAQ figures. While BioMed Central sends newly published articles to PubMed on a nightly basis , some publishers send data in large batches. Probably for this reason, OAQ figures can vary a fair amount from day to day. Multiple measurements should be done over the course of a month for maximum reliability. ]
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 23:20 Comments (1)
NIH Public Access Policy becomes mandatory from April 7th
With effect from April 7th 2008, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy requires all peer-reviewed articles resulting from research carried out with NIH funding to be deposited in the PubMed Central archive, and to be made freely available within at most 12 months of publication.
If you are an NIH grantee or employee, publishing in one of BioMed Central's 180+ open access journals is an easy and effective way to ensure automatic and optimal compliance with the NIH's policy.
Benefits for NIH-funded researchers of publishing in one of BioMed Central's open access journals
- All peer-reviewed research articles published by BioMed Central are automatically deposited in PubMed Central
- The official final version of the article is made freely available with no delay or embargo period
- Articles published in BioMed Central journals provide true open access thanks to an open access license agreement which allows (and encourages) re-distribution and re-use.
Inconveniences for NIH-funded authors when publishing in a subscription-only journal
- The author will generally be required to manually deposit a pre-publication manuscript version of their article in PubMed Central.
- The article must then go through a separate markup, layout and checking process, resulting in two versions of the article, an "official" Publisher version and an "unofficial" PubMed Central version
- The article will not be freely available during the embargo period following publication (typically 12 months), yet this is the very time when the article is of most interest to other researchers
- Exclusive rights to article generally remain with the publisher and so, even when the embargo is lifted, re-distribution and re-use remain prohibited.
Given these advantages, publishing in one of BioMed Central's open access journal's is a natural choice for NIH-funded researchers. Automatic deposit means you can spend less time depositing your article, and more time on carrying out your research, and immediate open access to the official published version ensures maximum visibility for your research.
Submitting your research to one of BioMed Central's peer reviewed open access journals is easy – find out more by following the link below:
How can I submit a manuscript to a BioMed Central journal?
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 17:25 Comments (4)
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)
Maximum access at minimum cost
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 10:19 Comments (2)