Posts tagged: Open Access

Impact Factors demonstrate Open Access quality

Deborah Kahn on August 1, 2014 at 3:26 pm - 0 Comments

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single journal in possession of a good impact factor must not be in want of good papers. In fact, we know that the impact factor does not tell the whole story about quality and that many scientists and institutions would like to find better ways to evaluate the quality of research output.

Nevertheless, it is an inescapable fact that around the world, the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) continues to be used as a proxy for quality, and the JIF continues to influence decisions on funding, promotions, and where to publish.

So it is no wonder that publishers, including BioMed Central, are interested to see where our journals sit within the most recent Journal …

July blogs digest: Impact Factors, swimmer’s itch, dodos, and more

Kam Marwaha on August 1, 2014 at 1:45 pm - 0 Comments

It’s been a bumper month on the BioMed Central blogs, so we wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve missed a few posts. Not to worry though, as we’ve pulled together all the highlights right here.

The new Impact Factors are coming…

(Or rather, they’ve now arrived!) Now is the time of year when journal editors all over the world sit repeatedly clicking ‘refresh’ on their browsers. Up? Down? Staying the same? What will happen to their journal’s Impact Factor when the Journal Citation Report is published? Diana Marshall, Senior Managing Editor of the BMC series, wrote about how the new Impact Factors will affect her journals, and the publishing world as a whole.

Swimmer’s itch: sailors, fishermen and swimmers beware

For those in the …

Building the Open Access Button

Guest on July 11, 2014 at 12:31 pm - 0 Comments

Ever felt frustrated by not being able to access a piece of research? In this guest post, Chealsye Bowley, Launch Coordinator for Open Access Button tells us how the Button could help and the work they’ve got in store to make it even more effective.

In November 2013 we launched the Open Access Button. The Button is a browser bookmarklet that allows users to report when they hit a paywall and are denied access to research. Being denied access to research is often an invisible problem and through the Button we aim to make the problem visible, collect the individual experiences, and showcase the global magnitude of the problem.

We’ve tracked and mapped over 8,300 …

WHO joins PubMed Central

Alanna Orpen on July 4, 2014 at 12:09 pm - 0 Comments

An open access world news update

There are many drivers behind the open access movement: to accelerate the pace of scientific research, discovery and innovation; increase the visibility, readership and impact of authors’ works, as well as to enhance interdisciplinary research, to name but a few. All factors point to one ultimate goal, the advancement of knowledge, which both researchers and publishers know, can only be reached by sharing results and making them as accessible as possible.

Back in January, the global health authority, the World Health Organisation (WHO), announced the launch of a new open access policy to ensure the widespread dissemination of scientific research. The policy, which applies to all WHO-authored or WHO-funded research published in external journals …

Creating impact – a game of two halves

Guest on June 30, 2014 at 10:33 am - 1 Comment

This is a guest blog by Prof Jonathan Grant, Director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London and Professor of Public Policy. He tells us about his recent experiences publishing with BMC Medicine.

Two weeks ago I was involved in the publication of a research article in BMC Medicine that attempted to measure the economic returns from cancer research. It showed that for every £1 invested by the UK government and medical research charities you got 10p back in terms of the value of health gains every year thereafter, and if you combined that with previous estimates of the ‘spillover’ (or broader economic effects), the return was 40 pence in the pound.

The work built on a previous …

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

Amye Kenall on May 13, 2014 at 9:21 am - 0 Comments

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 source computational tools to the role of publishers in reproducible research.

Below is an interview with the authors of the chapter ‘Open Science and the Role of Publishers in Reproducible Research’, Iain Hrynaszkiewicz (Outreach Director at F1000), Peter Li (Data Organisation Manager at GigaScience) and Scott Edmunds (Executive Editor at GigaScience).

Your chapter ‘Open Science and the Role of Publishers in Reproducible …

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 …

Open access to African research – Is it enough?

Lucy Abel on February 7, 2014 at 10:22 am - 0 Comments

Written by Ruth King

Open access is just one part of a successful research process. I am reminded of that during every conversation I take part in about open access to African research. It can end up sounding simplistic compared to the complex issues that surround it, such as availability and uptake; building capacity in doing and publishing research; looking beyond the research article as a format for communication of research; flawed reward systems for researchers and measuring the impact of a piece of research. All of those issues are raised in this Guardian piece on ideas to improve development research access and uptake, and are reflected in the work of Publishers for Development, a forum dedicated to …