Journal of Biomedical Semantics was launched today, aiming to address the barriers to access and integration of data in the public domain that can hinder reanalysis. Semantics are essential for mining and analyzing data and the ability to manage semantic representations is vital for making computational approaches productive for a large community. The first articles published in the journal today reflect this.

In their introductory editorial ‘BioMedical Semantics: the hub for Biomedical Research’ Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann and Goran Nenadic discuss the importance and history of biomedical semantics as an emerging field and examine the aims of this timely new journal. Also  published today, Dr Nigel Collier addresses the issue of systematically evaluating online health news to support automatic alerting, and an article from Ms Kristina Hettne and colleagues highlights the importance of applying rewrite and suppression rules for the identification of terms in biomedical text mining and recommends a useful software tool for this.

“We aspire to provide authors and readers with opportunities to semantically enrich their publications so that they can become part of an integrated semantics network of biomedicine” say Editors-in-Chief Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann and Goran Nenadic.

For more details on the journal and its articles please visit the journal website. For information on submitting to the journal please see our instructions for authors.