Posts tagged: Open Access

Coordinating care for people with dementia and their carers improves outcomes

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One of the commitments from the recent G8 dementia summit held in London in December 2013, was to support countries to strengthen health and social care systems, with the aim to improve care and services for people with dementia.

A research article, published today in open access journal Alzheimer’s Research and Therapy, shows that a care coordination programme for patients with Alzheimer’s disease and their carers resulted in improvements in psychosocial function of people with dementia. The programme, a partnership between community and health organisations, also showed positive results for carers.

The programme, called Partners in Dementia Care (PDC), is a partnership between healthcare and community agencies that provides care coordination for medical and non-medical needs of both patients …

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Accelerating medical discoveries in dementia and rheumatology

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This week, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), 10 biopharmaceutical companies and several non-profit organizations launched an unprecedented partnership to transform the current model for identifying and validating the most promising biological targets of disease for new diagnostics and drug development.

Currently in the US, developing a drug from early discovery through Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval takes well over a decade and has a failure rate of more than 95%. As a consequence, each success can cost $1 billion or more. It was therefore recognised that new approaches were required, and that collaborative efforts might be a way to increase the collective odds of success.

Through the Foundation for the NIH, the Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP) will invest …

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Equine regenerative medicine: yay or neigh?

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iStockphoto image of horse and foal

Horses have long been admired for their beauty, spirit, strength and speed. While a dog might be man’s best friend, the horse has been a near essential companion on humankind’s journey through history. While fewer horses are kept as a sole means of transport these days, they remain a big part of our lives, not least on the race track, where thousands of people still gather to watch them compete. What’s perhaps less well-known, however, is that the horse has also come to the fore as a model for regenerative medicine.

Despite limited understanding of their effects in vivo, stem cells are widely used in veterinary medicine, particularly in racehorses. Successful racehorses can be worth huge amounts of …

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The careers of converts – how a transfer to BioMed Central affects the Impact Factors of established journals

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Impact Factors for Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica

 

This is a post by Stefan Busch, Publisher at BioMed Central

Does open access increase the likelihood for articles to be cited, or to be cited more often, compared to articles published in subscription-based journals? The questions around such an ‘open access citation effect’ – its size, indeed its existence, and how it may relate to different open access models – have been discussed for many years.

A 2010 literature review by Alma Swan showed that the vast majority of relevant studies found evidence for the effect, and the growing number of such studies adds to our understanding of it and how it varies in relation to factors like academic disciplines, journal ranking, or open …

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Publishing House of Horrors – Spooky Science

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As Halloween begins, and night inevitably creeps closer, we’ve been scouring our open access research for the creepiest, weirdest, and grossest research we can get our claws into.

The world’s cutest vampire

The kodkod, also known as the guiña, is the smallest cat in the Americas. Not many people have heard of the kodkod, which seems to have stayed under the radar. While the kodkod looks not unlike your typical domestic cat (though perhaps with  fluffier fur and rounder ears), it has a rather dramatic reputation, according to a recent study.

The people of Chile mostly regard the kodkod as a vampire. Not just a vampire, but a sadistic murderer, a demon, or a …

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Open Access Week has come and gone – and it’s left a real imFact

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View the story “Open Access Week has come and gone – and it’s left a real imFact” on Storify

Open access, medical research and global health – a BMC Medicine Twitter chat

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View the story “Open access, medical research and global health” on Storify

BioMed Central rolls up its sleeves for citizen science

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OPAL Tree Survey staff briefing

Posted on behalf of Shreeya Nanda, Deputy Editor for Biology and Medicine, BioMed Central

At this year’s BMC Day, the once-yearly company bonding event, we got to be citizen scientists, participating in projects ranging from classifying cancer cells on a computer screen to venturing out into the unknown (not really, it was just a park in Vauxhall) to categorise trees. For some, conducting scientific research was a novel experience, for others it probably brought back memories (hopefully not painful ones) of previous lives in laboratories. But I think I can safely say that for all of us, it was an interesting and rewarding experience.

Citizen science, as the name suggests, is scientific research conducted by amateurs and non-professionals, and as a concept …

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Open Access Week: Redefining Impact – #imFact

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Today is the beginning of Open Access Week, the theme this year is Redefining Impact. This can raise so many questions, what is impact? How has open access made an impact on society? Are there any articles that have had an effect on everyday life? Has the fact that an article is not behind a paywall allowed it to make a difference? To answer these questions and generate discussion we will be tweeting facts about open access articles having an impact throughout the week using the hashtag #imFact.

Why not join the discussion by tweeting an open access article that you think has had an impact? We will be collating all the tweets at the end of …

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BioMed Central is gearing up for Open Access Week

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2013_Open-Access-Week_Facebook_160x160px


The 6th year of Open Access Week is fast approaching and we would like to tell you about some exciting events BioMed Central has planned to mark the week. Open Access Week is a global event  to increase awareness of the benefits of open access publishing, and give people the opportunity to discuss and share their views on the topic.

 

BioMed Central publishes all research articles open access, employing the Creative Commons attribution licence, which makes research freely available for all to read, re-use and build upon. As of September 2013, all BioMed Central journals are also published under an Open Data policy (Creative Commons CC0 waiver), which allows free re-use and distribution of all published data without legal restrictions. We believe that removing …

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