With the recent launch of our new online magazine Biome, we bring together a selection of highlights from BioMed Central journals and, in various ways, make them accessible to a broad readership.  In addition, the magazine will place a spotlight on research communities, providing researchers and clinicians with the latest research topics, discussions and community news.

Biome is divided into three sections, described below with a few highlights so far…

Research

The research section features research synopses: plain language summaries that place new findings reported in our journals in context, and explain their significance. We also host author Q&As, which give researchers a chance to put forward their own perspective on new findings, and include insights that perhaps you wouldn’t find in the original literature.

We’ll also be covering BioMed Central’s Research Awards in more depth, speaking to the winners of the recently announced 2012 awards throughout the year.

• Research synopses: Unearthing a mitochondrial fossil
• Author Q&A: Ubiquitous clinical sequencing: Matthew Bainbridge talks about finding rare disease mutations

Perspective

We’ll be talking to researchers, many of them opinion leaders for comment and analysis, and providing an overview of the latest research topics and discussions. There will be a focus on review articles and thematic series appearing in our journals, as well as the occasional retrospective look at significant publications and what followed.

• Podcast: Ray Gosling – first man to crystallize DNA discusses the road to the double helix
• Review synopsis: Profiling schizophrenia: insights from proteomics
• Thematic series: What we still don’t know about biology

Community

Biome will focus on the research community. With guest blogs, podcasts and video spotlights, we aim to also provide a forum for discussions about current political, scientific or medical issues.  We also want to look at the research cycle itself, and cover developments in peer review and publishing that are of direct relevance to active researchers and clinicians.

In Open Reading Frame, our weekly research roundup, we’ll bring together some of the highlights from the rest of the open access journal landscape.

• Q&A: Ben Goldacre discusses the AllTrials campaign
• Video Spotlight: Epigenetics & Chromatin Editors Steven Henikoff & Frank Grosveld

Through its selectivity Biome will act as a filter for findings of particular interest from the broad scope of biomedical research covered by our journals.

New features will appear almost every day, and we’ll be sending a mailing with a selection of highlights once a month – sign up for updates from the homepage.

It’s all completely free – no subscriptions required now or in the future!