It’s not often that I write about our blog network, but you may have noticed something different about us today. Or perhaps it’s your first time here. Either way, we really hope you like our new and improved website.

What is the BioMed Central blog network?

If you’re new here, here’s what you need to know: BioMed Central is an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher of 272 peer-reviewed open access journals and counting, which span all areas of biology, biomedicine and medicine.

Our blog network brings together news, opinion, and perspectives from our staff, our journal Editors, and many guest bloggers. Our blogs aim to highlight the best in open access research, report on news in different fields, and offer insights into publishing, as well as discuss the day-to-day work and challenges faced by researchers today.

Helping you find relevant content

We began the process of developing the new network when I joined as Blogs Manager at the end of 2013. Over the last year, we’ve spoken to staff, journal editors, and of course you, our readers, to find out how we could make our blog network more effective.

You told us that you wanted to be able to find posts that are relevant to you more easily, so we’ve tidied up our network of 21 blogs into a slick 7 – On Biology, On Medicine, On Health, BioMed Central blog, BMC Series blog, BugBitten, and GigaBlog.

We’ve also introduced ‘Topics’ which allow you to find content on each topic from across all of our blogs. And there’s new and improved search functionality, to help you find what you’re looking for.

Subscribe more easily

Of course, all blogs want readers to come back and read more, so we wanted to find out how we could help people access our content more easily.

Readers told us that they’d much rather subscribe to blogs via email than by RSS Feed. This sort of functionality is widely used on blogs nowadays, and I’m really pleased that we now have it too. You can subscribe to one blog or topic, or many. The choice is yours.

Credit where credit’s due

In true Oscars award ceremony style (it is the season, after all), I wanted to make sure everyone we’ve worked with over the last year to develop the site gets recognition for everything they’ve done.

Our agency – Manifesto – has been instrumental in the developing the new site, working in partnership with our in-house team of designers and our WordPress developer.  While our product manager has kept everyone on track.

We also have a number of staff here at BioMed Central who have been involved with the project the whole way through and you’ll now find many of them acting as Blog Editors for our different blogs.

I really hope you like the new platform. Make sure to keep coming back for lots of great new content from our staff and guest bloggers.

If you have questions or feedback about BioMed Central’s blog network, please email blogging@biomedcentral.com.