Posts tagged: Open Access

Knowledge sharing: key to improving dog health

Matthew Landau on April 16, 2014 at 2:21 pm - 0 Comments

To mark today’s launch of Canine Genetics and Epidemiology, we asked the Kennel Club’s Health Information Manager, Aimée Llewellyn, to tell us more about the journal’s background and its potential impact on the wellbeing of dogs:

The Kennel Club had been working to improve their educational resources for many years. In late 2011, it was agreed to investigate developing or potentially linking with a canine-focused scientific journal to make the newly emerging genetic research more accessible to the general public and dog breeders, as well as a more centralized resource for the veterinary community.

The problem was there wasn’t a journal already in place that focused purely, or even mainly, on dog health. So we looked into the …

OA: it’s not just about the access

Sabina Alam on April 3, 2014 at 3:26 pm - 0 Comments

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It has been over a decade since the launch of the first major open access (OA) journals by BioMed Central and PLoS, but controversies still surround the field. Many of these concern the legitimacy of some of the many open access journals that are now available. Of these, a subset of OA journals have collectively been termed ‘predatory’ due to their questionable publication practices. As with every new business model, there are people who try to exploit it, and it is important to know who to trust and how to identify the miscreants. In this blog, I want to continue that discussion about how you - as readers, researchers and prospective authors - can know which journals to …

Fostering open access in Asia

Kam Marwaha on March 28, 2014 at 10:07 am - 0 Comments

Research output in Asia is growing fast. According to National Science Foundation indicators published in February this year, the number of articles published by researchers in Asian countries increased from 89,000 in 1997 to 212,000 in 2011.

If that trend continues, Asia – with China very much in the vanguard – is likely to overtake both the US and European Union in terms of research output in the very near future. A Royal Society report from 2011 predicted that China would overtake the US sometime around now!

Given this trend, it makes sense that we’re also seeing an increase in the number of researchers from Asia choosing to publish their research open access. According to Joyce Li, our Journal Development …

Expand your knowledge of kidney health and function for World Kidney Day 2014

Hayley Henderson on March 13, 2014 at 4:19 pm - 0 Comments

What do you know about your kidneys and how they work? Current statistics show that 1 in 10 people have some form of chronic kidney disease (CKD), and that the prevalence of CKD is increasing dramatically, highlighting a need for greater awareness on a global scale. It is well known that kidney diseases can seriously affect your quality of life and also prove to be fatal, but under-reporting of kidney problems can be an issue as these diseases can go largely undetected. So… do you want to learn more about how to look after your kidneys?

Since its launch in 2006, World Kidney Day (WKD) has served to help increase public awareness in an attempt to reduce the impact …

Coordinating care for people with dementia and their carers improves outcomes

Kathryn Smith on February 28, 2014 at 12:19 pm - 0 Comments

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 …

Accelerating medical discoveries in dementia and rheumatology

Kathryn Smith on February 6, 2014 at 2:50 pm - 0 Comments

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 …

Equine regenerative medicine: yay or neigh?

Philippa Locke on February 3, 2014 at 10:12 am - 0 Comments

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 …

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

Kam Marwaha on January 15, 2014 at 9:39 am - 3 Comments

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 …

Publishing House of Horrors – Spooky Science

James Balm on October 31, 2013 at 4:30 pm - 1 Comment

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 …

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

James Balm on October 28, 2013 at 10:58 am - 0 Comments

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