Posts by Deborah Kahn

What do publishers do?

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“What do publishers do, and is their role understood by the science community?” was one of the key questions to arise at this week’s meeting of the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) in Frankfurt, and one which generated much discussion.

Like scientists, the majority of the people working in science publishing (many of whom were once scientists themselves) care deeply about what they do, and about doing it as well as possible—during a conference debate, librarian T. Scott Plutchak commented that whenever he meets publishing people he is impressed about how passionate we are.

As a result there is a shared concern amongst publishers that the people who we aim to serve don’t understand what we do, …

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200th title in BioMed Central portfolio marks a growing trend towards open access

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With the launch this week of Journal of Angiogenesis Research, the number of journals in BioMed Central’s portfolio reaches 200. This major milestone reflects a growing trend as senior academics and learned societies turn to open access to publish their new journals or to improve the reach and visibility of their existing journals.

The success of any scientific journal, open access or subscription based, depends on it receiving a good number of high-quality papers in its area of interest. But for a subscription-based journal to succeed, it faces the additional hurdle of selling enough subscriptions to pay for its costs. In the current financial environment, libraries are increasingly having to trim their collections and are finding it virtually impossible to …

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