Earlier this month, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) announced its ‘Policy on Access to Research Outputs’, stating that all EPSRC-funded research must be published as open access (OA) documents. From September 1st 2011, all research must be published as either ‘Gold’ or ‘Green’ OA with the decision resting with the author. EPSRC joins numerous major funding agencies,… Read more »
The African Union (AU) has undertaken a large initiative to nurture and increase African scientific research output. Last month the AU launched the first African Innovation Outlook – a survey of African research, development and innovation activity. The report, which contained research and development figures for 13 of Africa’s 54 countries, has been hailed as the most detailed picture to date on what… Read more »
BioMed Central and Edanz hosted two complimentary workshops for authors in China last month. Zhejiang University School of Medicine (ZUSM), a BioMed Central member, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine (SJTU-SM), hosted more than 140 scientists at seminars, led by Ms Diane Wang, Publishing Manager China for BioMed Central, and Dr Warren Raye,… Read more »
A new study into the growth of open access publishing has highlighted a ten-fold increase over the last decade. The average annual growth rate in the number of open access articles published is now over 30%, demonstrating the increasing appetite in the scientific community for peer-reviewed research to be freely available online. The number of open access journals… Read more »
Guest blog post from Sharon F. Terry, CEO of Genetic Alliance and Project co-leader of THAT’SMYDATA. Here, Sharon talks about the Genetic Alliance Conference which will continue several projects started at the Sage Commons Congress, a meeting which launched several data sharing initiatives and at which Editor-in-Chief Eric Schadt announced a new BioMed Central journal,… Read more »
Currently only 0.7% of all research published comes from sub-Saharan Africa, yet African researchers have a key role to play in finding solutions to the many challenges faced by African countries. As an open access publisher BioMed Central is working to increase the visibility of scientific research from Africa with a set of initiatives designed… Read more »