Bringing together the open access publishing activities of Science Navigation Group, Open Access Central includes BioMed Central and its newly launched sister site, Chemistry Central. Future open access initiatives such as PhysMath Central will also fall under the Open Access Central umbrella.
BioMed Central Publisher, Matthew Cockerill, says: "The rapid growth of open access publishing in biomedicine has attracted the attention of researchers and funders in other disciplines. It has become clear that open access journals are equally necessary in fields such as chemistry and physics. With the launch of Open Access Central, we are making the open access journal publishing system available to groups of researchers in other fields who wish to start open access journals."
Open Access Central builds on BioMed Central's success in biomedicine. Launching its first journals in 2000, BioMed Central has grown rapidly and today publishes over 160 open access journals, with many more in the pipeline. BioMed Central's biomedical journals have gone from strength to strength, publishing thousands of peer reviewed articles, and demonstrating their quality with impressive Thomson Scientific (ISI) impact factors.
Chemistry Central, also launched today, will publish peer-reviewed research in chemistry and makes it immediately available online with no access charges or subscriptions. The publishers' website currently features articles from existing open access chemistry journals published with BioMed Central, including Geochemical Transactions and Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry. It also includes chemistry-related content from other BioMed Central journals such as BMC Chemical Biology. Chemistry Central will soon be launching further chemistry journals, including Chemistry Central Journal, a major new open access title covering all areas of chemistry.
PhysMath Central is planned for launch at a future date, and will feature peer-reviewed research in all areas of mathematics and physics.
Also see today's announcement of Chemistry Central:
Chemistry Central, launched today, is a new open access website for chemists. It brings together peer-reviewed research in chemistry from a range of open access journals. All the original research articles on Chemistry Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication.
Chemistry Central has been developed by the same team who created BioMed Central, the leading biomedical open access publisher.
Bryan Vickery, Deputy Publisher at BioMed Central and a chemist by training, says "We have seen increasing interest from chemists in the open access publishing model and, having launched two chemistry-specific titles in the last 18 months, the time seemed right for BioMed Central to create an open access publishing website to meet the needs of chemists."...
Journals featured on Chemistry Central incorporate special features to make them suitable for chemistry-related content. For example, authors can submit their figures as ChemDraw or ISISDraw files, and see an instant thumbnail preview showing how the web version of the figure will appear. Articles published in the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry also incorporate a graphical abstract on the table of contents and search results pages, providing a quick visual summary the research reported in the article.
As well as viewing the latest research highlights and content from featured journals, users of Chemistry Central can discuss articles, submit manuscripts, sign up for email alerts and find out more about starting a new open access chemistry journal or transferring an existing title to the Chemistry Central open access model....
Chemists who wish to support open access to published research by playing an editorial role on this major new journal should contact editorial@chemistrycentral.com....
Comment. This is a significant development. BMC is the largest OA publisher and is taking its experience to chemistry, physics, and mathematics. These three fields will benefit by having BMC siblings publishing in their midst. Open Access Central will benefit from greater economies of scale, making its business model more robust.
Note that PLoS has moved beyond biomedicine with PLoS ONE, a different way to generalize its experience. In both cases, researchers everywhere will benefit from the growing body of OA literature, the spread of experienced OA publishing to new fields, and the growing momentum for OA itself.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/22/2006 10:08:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
