Genome Biology Advisory Board member Edward Marcotte receives Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award.

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One of the newest recruits to Genome Biology’s Advisory board, Edward Marcotte, has been awarded the 2008 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award from The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas (TAMEST). Edward Marcotte is the William and Gwyn Shive Endowed Professor and the Mr. and Mrs. Corbin J. Robertson Sr. Regents Fellow in Molecular Biology in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also a member of the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology and is co-director of the Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology.

In addition to his role in mapping protein network interactions in different organisms, he created spotted …

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Medscape develops Continuing Medical Education based on open access research articles

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Several open access articles published by BioMed Central have recently been used by Medscape to produce Continuing Medical Education (CME) material.  These articles span a broad range of specialties, including general practice, psychiatry, surgery, endocrinology, and preventive medicine. 

It
is wonderful to see open access research being used in this way to
create CME. A key advantage of open access is the opportunity it
provides to reuse published research to educate researchers, clinicians
and the general public. BioMed Central is planning increased activity
in the area of medical education over the coming months. We are working
with Medscape to increase the number of CME activities created from
BioMed Central articles, including the use of case reports from the …

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Alzheimer’s article in Journal of Neuroinflammation catches media attention

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An article reporting a reversal of Alzheimer’s symptoms has captured the attention of science journalists around the globe.

The case report, published in the Journal of Neuroinflammation, describes a dramatic reversal of Alzheimer’s symptoms in a patient following treatment using the anti-tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF) therapeutic, etanercept.

Coverage has included a 3 minute broadcast feature  on CNN, with newspaper reports spanning the world from the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail to the Australian Herald Sun, and web coverage including ScienceDaily, Ars Technica and Slashdot.

Matt McKay
Head of PR, BioMed Central

Neural Development celebrates its 1st birthday

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Neural Development, launched a year ago under the guidance
of Editors-in-Chief Andrew Lumsden, Joshua Sanes, Bill Harris, and Rachel Wong,
celebrates its 1st birthday with a special Editorial,
highlighting the successes and future directions of the journal.

Since launch, Neural
Development has become a must-read within the community, filling a vacant
niche in journal coverage for developmental neurobiologists.  Articles published have been of a
consistently high quality, cover the breadth of the field, and come from labs
all over the world.  Several articles have been selected by the literature evaluation service Faculty
of 1000, and many articles are “highly accessed”. 

Neural
Development plans to
build on the successes of the last year by introducing new features; …

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SCImago – a new source of journal metrics offering a wealth of free data on open access journals

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Bibliometrics (the measurement of scholarly
citation) has long been dominated by the Science Citation Index. Created by
Eugene Garfield in the 1960s, the SCI is now made
available online as Web
of Science by Thomson Scientific. In the last few years however two new services, Scopus and Google Scholar, have created competition
for Web of Science, providing an alternative means to discover which articles
have cited a particular research article. Scopus, a paid for service, offers an
attractive user interface that is arguably easier to use and in some ways more powerful than that of Web of
Science, while Google Scholar, though more limited in functionality, has the
significant benefit of being free.

Until very recently, though, one …

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“What have you changed your mind about?”

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One of the great things about the internet in general, and open access
research in particular, is how accessible the frontiers of human knowledge have
become. The website edge.org demonstrates this
with a thought-provoking set of 165 short essays from
leading neuroscientists, physicists, technologists, philosophers and other
thinkers, in response to the following question:

When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that’s faith.
When facts change your mind, that’s science.
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?
Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How
have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?

A small selection of highlights:

Roger Shank, one of the
founding …

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Genome Biology welcomes new members to its Advisory Board

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Along with the New Year come some changes to Genome Biology‘s international and well-renowned Advisory Board. A handful of founder members retired at the end of 2007; we are tremendously grateful for their help and support during the journal’s early years and for their contribution to shaping Genome Biology into the high-impact and well-regarded journal that it is today.

As the journal evolves we are committed to further development, and we are therefore delighted to welcome aboard several new members (listed below) who will help us to meet new challenges and who bring new strength in their areas of expertise, including plant and systems biology, epigenetics, protein evolution and cancer profiling. With the advice and support of …

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NIH Public Access Policy to become mandatory

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Many open access advocates will already have
heard that NIH’s Public Access Policy,
until now voluntary, is set to become mandatory following President Bush’s
approval on Dec 26th 2007 of the latest NIH appropriations bill, which includes the following wording:

"The
Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all
investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National
Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final,
peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly
available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication:
Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner
consistent with copyright law."

This is great …

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Bruce Ponder, Editor-in-Chief of Breast Cancer Research, receives knighthood

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Bruce Ponder, Editor-in-Chief of Breast Cancer Research, has been recognised with a knighthood in the 2008 New Year’s honours list for services to medicine. Sir Bruce is Li Ka Shing Professor of Oncology at Cambridge University and Director of the newly-opened Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute, where he continues to carry out research on genetic susceptibility to cancer.

He launched Breast Cancer Research with BioMed Central in July 1999. Breast Cancer Research
is an international, peer-reviewed online journal, publishing original
research, reviews, commentaries and reports. The journal has an Impact Factor
of 4.16.

Congratulations to Sir Bruce from all at BioMed Central.

Frances Mulvany
In-house Editor, Breast Cancer Research

Hidden species present conservation challenge; a new Journal of Biology minireview

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DNA studies are
revealing the true extent of hidden or ‘cryptic’ biodiversity. Cryptic species
are difficult to distinguish morphologically but the importance of what is revealed
by DNA data is discussed in a recent minireview for Journal of Biology
by Luciano Beheregaray and Adalgisa Caccone. The minireview highlights two
recent papers that challenge the commonly held view that cryptic species are
rare and recent occurrences.

In an article
published in BMC Biology, a team
led by Robert Wayne reports the discovery of at least six cryptic species in
the giraffe, with distinct evolutionary and genetic traits. This finding
challenges the view that cryptic biodiversity is rare in large mammals that are
expected to travel, mix and avoid …

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