Monthly Archives: May 2014

BioMed Central announces overall winner of 8th Annual Research Awards

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After months of work nominating, whittling down, discussing, dare I say arguing, and finally voting, we can now announce that the winners of BioMed Central’s 8th Annual Research Awards, sponsored by antibodies-online.com, are…   Ellen Heitzer and Michael Speicher from the Medical University of Graz, Austria, and their fellow researchers, for their research investigating markers… Read more »

Publishing

BioMed Central staff take on a charity challenge

Staff at work

On Friday 16th May, 26 people from BioMed Central’s London office (and another 15 from our fellow Springer companies) shut down their computers, closed their notepads, and headed off into the great outdoors to spend a day working in their local communities instead of the office. Here’s what happened next… Staff here at BioMed Central… Read more »

Publishing

Peer review – open, portable, post-publication? A discussion with BMC editors and twitter chat on Storify

At our Editors’ Conference on 14 May 2014 we had an opportunity to discuss conducting high quality peer review and avoiding the pitfalls. The panellists were Ian Cree (Section Editor for BMC Cancer), Carole Goble (Editorial Board Member for GigaScience) and Volkhard Helms (Section Editor for BMC Biophysics), and the discussion was chaired by our… Read more »

Publishing

Open Repository now part of the IRUS-UK program

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 Posts We’re pleased to announce that all our UK client repositories are now able to participate in the IRUS-UK program. Our clients Chester  Anglia Ruskin Research Online, ARRO  TeesRep – Teesside University’s research collection are early adopters, with the University of Bedfordshire,University of Derby and Manchester Metropolitan University due to follow shortly. IRUS-UK aggregates details… Read more »

Technology

Open Repository: coming to a location near you!

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A busy month ahead for Open Repository’s global team North America:  Open Repository will be attending the annual ALA conference in Las Vegas,  June 26th-July 1st. You can find us at Booth 1667 alongside our BioMed Central & Papers colleagues. Open Repository Sales Manager, Claire Bundy, will be on hand to discuss Open Repository’s services…. Read more »

Technology

A worthy approach to peer review?

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BioMed Central announces a new partnership with Axios Review, an external peer review service that aims to improve the efficiency of the peer review system. Peer review is one of the bedrocks of the scientific process. It’s also one of its most criticised aspects. Of the many criticisms, one of the clearest is its wastefulness…. Read more »

Publishing

Should there be training for peer reviewers?

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Last month, guest blogger Fiona Russell – a post doctoral researcher studying chronic pain, inflammation, and arthritis – attended a Sense about Science peer review workshop (which our Biology Editor, Elizabeth Moylan, took part in on the panel). Here, she writes about the need for young researchers to develop their peer review skills and how journals could do more… Read more »

Publishing
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What is wrong with traditional peer review?

Peer review is the current hot topic of discussion in publishing circles, and the situation is no different at BioMed Central. We’ve already organised two panel discussions on the subject, one in Boston at the Experimental Biology conference (21 April 2013), which focussed on the limitations of the traditional peer review model, and another one… Read more »

Publishing

Implementing Reproducible Research: the Role of Publishers. An interview with Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Peter Li, and Scott Edmunds

Implementing Reproducible Research, recently released by CRC Press and edited by Victoria Stodden, Friedrich Leisch, and Roger Peng, clearly describes the changes needed in science and publishing to help foster reproducible research. With contributions from key leaders in computational science, such as Titus Brown, the book covers topics ranging from good programming practice and open… Read more »

Open Access Publishing