Following our call for contributions to BMC Research Notes on data standards, sharing and publication, the journal and this initiative have received considerable attention from the research community. Today we launch this series of educational articles, as we publish the first of the numerous manuscripts we have received since September.

This new article by Tony Mathys and Maged Boulos gives an overview of the geospatial resources available for the health research community and public health sector to help them manage and share their data. It joins our previously published Data Note by Andrew Vickers and Angel Cronin and our editorial call for contributions in the series.

The series, supervised by our guest Editors and prominent Open Data advocates Dr Bill Hooker and Prof David Shotton, will grow substantially in 2011 as we are receiving contributions from across biology and medicine, including proteomics, flow cytometry, metabolomics, brain mapping and open bibliography.

We are still keen to receive more contributions, and authors are currently entitled to a full waiver of the article processing charge for accepted articles in this series. Articles should describe a domain-specific data standard and provide an example data set with the article, or a link to data that are permanently hosted elsewhere. The journal is also interested in receiving contributions to the series on broader aspects of scientific data sharing, archiving, and open data. If you would like to contribute a manuscript please refer to our call for contributions and get in touch with BMC Research Notes editorial team by sending us an email.

You can follow our most recent initiatives in Open Data on the BioMed Central blog.

Guillaume Susbielle, PhD
In-house Editor BMC Research Notes