BioMed Central, Open Access Publishing, and Digital Archiving

1
BioMed Central,Open Access Publishing, and
Digital Archiving
Matthew CockerillTechnical Director, BioMed
Central
2
Summary of talk

• What is Open Access publishing and why is it
  necessary?
• The growth of BioMed Central as an Open Access
  publisher
• The benefits of Open Access for Digital Archiving

3
Summary of talk

• What is Open Access Publishing and why is it
  necessary?
• The growth of BioMed Central as an Open Access
  publisher
• The benefits of Open Access for Digital Archiving

4
The current model of publishing scientific
research

• Scientists carry out research
• They write up their results
• They submit them to a journal
• Other scientists act as peer reviewers and
  editorial advisers
• Finally, the publisher sells access to that
  research back to the scientific community

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Whats wrong with this status quo?

• Restricted redistribution of scientific research
  is contrary to the interests of
• the scientists who do the research
• the funders who pay for it
• society as a whole
• It is an historical artefact of the economics of
  print publishing

6
BioMed Central the first Open Access publisher

• Part of Current Science Group
• Published first article in mid-2000
• Strict policy of immediate open access to all
  research articles

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Scientific benefits of Open Access

• Quicker, more direct access to research results
• Research is equally accessible to all scientists,
  not just those at the richest institutions
• Even for the fortunate few, Open Access gets rid
  of the frustration with passwords, logins and
  subscriptions
• Ability to manipulate, analyze, and mine the
  literature for knowledge

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Economic benefits of Open Access

• Cost per article access for Elsevier journals
  estimated at approx US 11(Washington State
  University estimate)
• A typical BioMed Central open-access research
  article receives 2000 full text accesses in the
  2 years following publication, and a similar
  number of accesses again via PubMed Central.
• Cost to the scientific community 500. So cost
  per access 500/(20002) 0.125
• Cost-per access reduced almost 100-fold!

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Momentum for Open Access

• PubMed Central
• Public Library of Science
• Open Access declarationsBudapest/Bethesda/Berlin
  
• Software open-source movement
• Mass cancellation of titles from traditional
  publishers

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BioMed Centrals business model for open access
publishing

• Keep costs down via
• Online submission and peer review
• Automated tools to streamline article processing,
  conversion and layout
• Processing charge (currently 500) for accepted
  articles
• No processing charge for authors at member
  institutions

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Institutional membership
More than 350 major institutions are members of
BioMed Central, including, to name just a few

• CalTech
• Cancer Research UK
• Columbia University
• Cornell University
• University of California
• Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
• Harvard University
• INSERM
• Imperial College
• Institut Pasteur
• John Innes Centre
• Johns Hopkins University
• Kyoto University
• Max Planck Institutes
• Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

• MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
• National Institutes of Health
• National Institute for Medical Research
• NHS England
• Princeton University
• Rockefeller University
• TIGR
• TSRI
• Tufts University
• Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
• University of Wisconsin
• World Health Organization
• Yale University

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Summary of talk

• What is Open Access publishing and why is it
  necessary?
• The growth of BioMed Central as an Open Access
  publisher
• The benefits of Open Access for Digital Archiving

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3 categories of journals published by BioMed
Central

• BMC series of online journals
• Policy to accept all sound research, and to
  editorially highlight the best
• Scientist-run online journals
• Editorial board determines acceptance policy
• Print/online journals
• Highly selective

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BMC series of online journals

• BMC Biochemistry
• BMC Bioinformatics
• BMC Biotechnology
• BMC Cell Biology
• BMC Chemical Biology
• BMC Developmental Biology
• BMC Ecology
• BMC Evolutionary Biology
• BMC Genetics
• BMC Genomics
• BMC Immunology
• BMC Microbiology
• BMC Molecular Biology
• BMC Neuroscience
• BMC Pharmacology
• BMC Physiology
• BMC Plant Biology
• BMC Structural Biology

• BMC Anesthesiology
• BMC Blood Disorders
• BMC Cancer
• BMC Cardiovascular Disorders
• BMC Clinical Pathology
• BMC Clinical Pharmacology
• BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• BMC Dermatology
• BMC Ear, Nose and Throat Disorders
• BMC Emergency Medicine
• BMC Endocrine Disorders
• BMC Family Practice
• BMC Gastroenterology
• BMC Geriatrics
• BMC Health Services Research
• BMC Infectious Diseases
• BMC International Health and Human Rights
• BMC Medical Education
• BMC Medical Ethics

• BMC Medical Imaging
• BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
• BMC Medical Research Methodology
• BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders
• BMC Nephrology
• BMC Neurology
• BMC Nuclear Medicine
• BMC Nursing
• BMC Ophthalmology
• BMC Oral Health
• BMC Palliative Care
• BMC Pediatrics
• BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth
• BMC Psychiatry
• BMC Public Health
• BMC Pulmonary Medicine
• BMC Surgery
• BMC Urology
• BMC Women's Health

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BMC Cancer
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Two new BMC-series journals

• Will publish research of broad interest

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Scientist-run online journals
45 such journals started so far, including
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Malaria Journal
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La crème de la crème
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La crème de la crème
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Growth of BioMed Central
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Facts and figures

• 3700 Open Access research articles published
• 2144 in BMC online journal series
• 1158 in scientist-run online journals
• 650 in print/online journals
• Full text article accesses to date
• 7,000,000 (excluding mirrors)

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Open access leads to high visibility

• Indexing/Linking
• PubMed
• MEDLINE
• ISI
• BIOSIS
• CAS
• CrossRef
• Scirus
• Open Archive Initiative
• Citebase
• Google

• Archiving
• PubMed Central
• INIST
• LOCKSS
• Max Planck
• OhioLINK

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Open Access and citation impact
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Summary of talk

• What is Open Access publishing and why is it
  necessary?
• The growth of BioMed Central as an Open Access
  publisher
• The benefits of Open Access for Digital Archiving

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OAI interface

• BioMed Central has operated an OAI interface
  (Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting
  Protocol) since June 2001
• The following metadata formats are offered for
  all articles
• oai_dc (standard Dublin Core XML)
• bmc_bibl (BioMed Centrals own XML)
• bmc_references (article reference list XML)
• In addition, for Open Access articles, full text
  XML is available
• bmc_article
• More info http//www.biomedcentral.com/info/libra
  ries/oai/

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Data feeds to mirror sites and other archives

• Automated nightly feed goes to
• PubMed Central
• OhioLINK
• INIST/CNRS
• Max Planck (Universität Potsdam)
• your name here

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Data mining
http//www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/datamining

• Entire corpus of full text XML downloadable by
  ftp as a single zip file
• Various groups working with the data
• Pre-BIND (automatic extraction of protein binding
  information from full text)
• BioLINK text mining competition
• Standard NLM archiving/interchange DTD will help
  data miners

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Conclusions

• Open Access publishing is rapidly gaining
  momentum
• It can make life much simpler for digital
  archives
• It facilitates the smooth flow of scientific
  research information
• It encourages the development of innovative tools
  for mining and navigating that information