I am delighted to announce that BMC Biomedical Engineering, a new open access, peer-reviewed journal is now open for submissions and with it the BMC series enters for the first time a new subject area: engineering. This is the first of two newly launched journals in the BMC series. Editor Harriet Manning discusses the launch of BMC Chemical Engineering in her blog post.

2018 has been declared as the “Year of Engineering” by the UK government, an initiative that has seen wide support by hundreds of national and international organisations. We see no better time to expand our offering to this diverse and crucial community and help in supporting its impact on the world’s most pressing matters, including economic growth, policy, climate change, health, food and sustainability.

Biomedical engineering is a rapidly growing field that creates lasting impact on global health and society. It has existed for many centuries, in a mixture of forms, but it wasn’t until the twentieth century when major discoveries in the physical sciences enabled it to evolve exponentially. The invention of the electrocardiograph by William Einthoven (Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1924) in the start of the century changed the course of the diagnosis and treatment for the cardiovascular system. The developments of x-ray imaging, the electron microscope and the concept of artificial organs are only a few technological innovations that revolutionised medicine in the mid to late 20^th century. Even the Human Genome Project, perhaps the most important scientific endeavour of the ’90s, that pushed the boundaries of science, was enabled by key biomedical engineering innovations and technologies in the fields of automation, robotics, software databasing and sequencing.

Continuous technological innovation has steered biomedical engineering from the macro- (organ/body) to the micro-world (cell/molecular). The result is an ecosystem where a given sub-field may span multiple scales of observation (e.g. in biomechanics, from human kinetics and gait analysis to mechanobiology) and scientific disciplines (electrical/mechanical engineering, chemistry, medicine etc.) that come together to define it.

The future looks bright for the field as biologists, clinicians and engineers keep pioneering towards the understanding, prevention, diagnosis and treatment of human disease. Clinics and medical doctors are empowered with ever more tools through innovations in automation, robotics, medical devices, nanotechnology, tissue engineering, informatics and many more.

BMC Biomedical Engineering celebrates this interdisciplinary approach and is being launched to provide the biomedical engineering community with a global open access venue for robust research with the ultimate goal of improving human health, by combining tools and methods from biology and medicine with mathematics, physical sciences and engineering.

As a member of the BMC series, the ethos of BMC Biomedical Engineering is open and inclusive, and the journal does not make editorial decisions on the basis of the interest of a study or its likely impact. Submissions are rigorously peer reviewed to assess scientific validity and published articles will become freely available to all readers irrespective of their location.

BMC Biomedical Engineering will complement and strengthen the open access portfolio of the BMC series, which currently focuses on biology and medicine, and expand it into engineering. Its multidisciplinary attributes allow it to collaborate with existing sister BMC series titles that represent established medical communities such as BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, BMC Medical Imaging or BMC Cancer, and make research visible to a wide network of relevant clinical audiences (for example, via cross-journal special issues). Our authors will gain the opportunity to be featured in our highly visible BMC series blog network where we disseminate our most prominent research to a diverse audience of biologists, clinicians and now… engineers.

To navigate the wide range of biomedical engineering research, BMC Biomedical Engineering will be divided into six sections, governed by six expert Section Editors and supported by an international Editorial Board:

• ‘Biomaterials, nanomedicine and tissue engineering’ edited by Dimitrios Zeugolis, NUI Galway, Republic of Ireland
• ‘Medical technologies, robotics and rehabilitation engineering’, edited by Alan Lefor, Jichi University, Japan
• ‘Biosensors and bioelectronics’, edited by Zhi Yang, University of Minnesota, USA
• ‘Computational and systems biology’, edited by Yong Wang, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
• ‘Biomechanics’, edited by Antonio Veloso, University of Lisbon, Portugal
• ‘Biomedical Imaging’, edited by Jong Chul Ye, Korean Advanced Institute of Technology, South Korea

The board will be supported by an Editorial Advisory Board of senior scientists and researchers that will be chaired by Distinguished Professor Sang Yup Lee from the Korean Advanced Institute of Technology.

We would like to invite you to submit your research to the journal and be part of this unique community. The journal will launch its first articles in November 2018, so submit now and be one of our founding authors!

If you would like to know more about the journal or have any pre-submission queries, feel free to email me at alexandros.houssein@biomedcentral.com. The journal will be present at ACS Fall 2018 (19-23 August, Boston, Massachusetts) and at BMES 2018 (17-20 October, Atlanta, Georgia), and we will be delighted to meet you.