1. Innovation in Journal Publishing: Some thoughts from BioMed Central Deborah Kahn Publishing Director, BioMed Central

2. Some background on BioMed Central  An open access publisher –No subscription barriers to research –Journal costs covered by Article processing charges –Typically paid by author's funder/institution, sometimes by the author Direct institutional support of journal

3. BMC journal portfolio  199 journals (and growing….) All peer-reviewed Archived in PubMed Central, INIST and other international archives 59 have impact factors, another 24 are tracked for inclusion Searchable and retrievable Articles are included in PubMed, Scopus, Google, CrossRef, Scirus Some journals –Indexed in MEDLINE, Biosis (all biology titles), CAS –Tracked by Thomson-Reuters for Impact Factors

5. BMC journals are not so different from ‘traditional’ journals  All journals are peer-reviewed  All journals have Editors (either in- house or external)  All journals have Editorial/Advisory Boards

6. But then again, we are also different

7. Wide choice of file types  Manuscript –Word, Word Perfect, RTF, PDF, LaTeX, DVI, Publicon  Figures –EPS, PDF, PNG, Word, PPT, TIFF, JPG, BMP, CDX, TGF  Reaction schemes –TGF, CDX  Additional files –Any! –Excellent support for video files  Mini-websites –Zip file containing an index.html file

8. Full text

9. Final product MathML

10. Full text VideoMini-websites

11. Article tracking  Authors can track their manuscript(s) through the publishing process –My BioMed Central combines information on manuscript for which you are an editor, author or peer reviewer  BioMed Central’s integrated system maintains single history files for all manuscripts –Histories for transferred manuscripts are linked

12. Citations and downloads “Senior authors believe downloads to be more credible measure of the usefulness of research then traditional citations.” http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ciber/ciber_2005_survey_final.pdf “Open access articles receive 50% more full- text accesses and PDF downloads than subscription-access articles.” Kenneth R. Fulton, PNAS Publisher

13. Article statistics  Author can track downloads –Via My BioMed Central –receives email x months after publication, detailing download statistics  Highly accessed articles are flagged with  Coming soon … –cited by, Citeulike, blogged

16. Going (more than) one step further…

18. Completing the scientific record Avoiding bias, wasted time and effort; freeing the “dark data” Unlimited space for complete reporting

19. Access to raw data  Some concerns  Patient privacy  Time constraints  Space constraints  Mistakes identified  Alternative analysis may have commercial value  Loss of intellectual property  Risk of misinterpretation  How to incentivise authors to deposit their data

20. Continuing discussions  Agree and support universal standards  Data already needs to be fit for analysis  Third party repositories; change journal/publisher  Encourage better research practices  Embargoes and/or access clearance  Who really owns the data?  Subsequent papers subject to same standards

21. Web 2.0/Social networking  Twitter  Facebook  Blogging  Patient information  Commenting

22. Thank you deborah.kahn@biomedcentral.com