So much is changing in research communities, and in how science is communicated and accessed, and because of that we think it’s time to refresh our journal websites to better serve these communities. We want to deliver an even better experience to researchers, to help them find and publish great science easily.

From today you’ll be able to see an early ‘beta’ – work in progress – version of our new websites for you to take a look at, so you can tell us what you think.

Our ambition

We want to build faster, more flexible journal websites that can evolve in response to the scientific community’s needs.

Technology and ways of working in scientific publishing, as well as in science more broadly, are continuing to change rapidly. We need websites that can adapt to these changes as they happen, and which will continuously provide the most up-to-date and innovative ways of communicating science. We believe that the way we’re redeveloping the sites now will allow us to ensure that happens.

What you’ll see in the beta version now

Having a beta like this allows us to get early feedback and make sure what we build is what researchers actually want and need. We want researchers to be able to do tasks on our websites as efficiently and rewardingly as possible. The new beta websites are in very early stages and they are constantly evolving. Your feedback now will help us to decide what we build next.

This is the approach we’re aiming to take with all our software development; getting feedback during the development process means we can respond faster and more effectively. Ultimately, we want to make sure we’re producing the best possible websites for the scientific community.

Currently on our beta, you can search for and read most of our scientific articles, as well as see how our websites work on desktop, tablet and mobile devices. At the moment what you can do is fairly basic, because we’re focusing on performance and the consumption of scientific content, but we’ll be adding more features soon, building towards the overall vision we have for the websites. We’d love you to use the feedback survey to tell us what you think.

Get involved

You can access our beta sites at beta.biomedcentral.com. When you do, please take time to have a look at the introductory page which will tell you a bit more about what to expect. And most importantly, once you’ve looked round the sites make sure to tell us what you think, using the feedback form which can be found at the top of every page.

Enjoy!