Innovation in Journal Publishing: Some thoughts from BioMed Central

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Innovation in Journal PublishingSome thoughts
from BioMed Central

• Deborah Kahn
• Publishing Director, BioMed Central

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Some background on BioMed Central

• An open access publisher
• No subscription barriers to research
• Journal costs covered by
• Article processing charges
• Typically paid by author's funder/institution,
  sometimes by the author
• Direct institutional support of journal

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BMC journal portfolio

• 199 journals (and growing.)
• All peer-reviewed
• Archived in PubMed Central, INIST and other
  international archives
• 59 have impact factors, another 24 are tracked
  for inclusion
• Searchable and retrievable
• Articles are included in PubMed, Scopus, Google,
  CrossRef, Scirus
• Some journals
• Indexed in MEDLINE, Biosis (all biology titles),
  CAS
• Tracked by Thomson-Reuters for Impact Factors

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BMC journals are not so different from
traditional journals

• All journals are peer-reviewed
• All journals have Editors (either in-house or
  external)
• All journals have Editorial/Advisory Boards

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But then again, we are also different
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Wide choice of file types

• Manuscript
• Word, Word Perfect, RTF, PDF, LaTeX, DVI,
  Publicon
• Figures
• EPS, PDF, PNG, Word, PPT, TIFF, JPG, BMP, CDX,
  TGF
• Reaction schemes
• TGF, CDX
• Additional files
• Any!
• Excellent support for video files
• Mini-websites
• Zip file containing an index.html file

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Full text
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Final product
MathML
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Full text
Video
Mini-websites
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Article tracking

• Authors can track their manuscript(s) through the
  publishing process
• My BioMed Central combines information on
  manuscript for which you are an editor, author or
  peer reviewer
• BioMed Centrals integrated system maintains
  single history files for all manuscripts
• Histories for transferred manuscripts are linked

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Citations and downloads

• Senior authors believe downloads to be more
  credible measure of the usefulness of research
  then traditional citations.
• http//www.ucl.ac.uk/ciber/ciber_2005_survey_fina
  l.pdf
• Open access articles receive 50 more full-text
  accesses and PDF downloads than
  subscription-access articles.
• Kenneth R. Fulton, PNAS Publisher

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Article statistics

• Author can track downloads
• Via My BioMed Central
• receives email x months after publication,
  detailing download statistics
• Highly accessed articles are flagged with
• Coming soon
• cited by, Citeulike, blogged

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Going (more than) one step further
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Completing the scientific record
Avoiding bias, wasted time and effort freeing
the dark data
Unlimited space for complete reporting
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Access to raw data

• Some concerns
• Patient privacy
• Time constraints
• Space constraints
• Mistakes identified
• Alternative analysis may have commercial value
• Loss of intellectual property
• Risk of misinterpretation
• How to incentivise authors to deposit their data

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Continuing discussions

• Agree and support universal standards
• Data already needs to be fit for analysis
• Third party repositories change
  journal/publisher
• Encourage better research practices
• Embargoes and/or access clearance
• Who really owns the data?
• Subsequent papers subject to same standards

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Web 2.0/Social networking

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Blogging
• Patient information
• Commenting

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Thank you

• deborah.kahn_at_biomedcentral.com