BioMed Central is part of the Current Science Group
[
http://current-science-group.com]. Current Science Group is an
independent, privately owned publishing group and has no connection with
Elsevier Science. In 1997 several companies within the Current Science
Group (Current Biology, BioMedNet and ChemWeb) were sold to Elsevier
Science, this may account for any confusion about ownership.
BioMed Central believes that primary research should be available free to
all, globally, and without any barriers to access. We believe the new
technologies that are now available allow publishing of primary research to
be done at very low cost and much more efficiently than before.
BMC will develop technological and logistical methods to make the process of
submitting, refereeing and publishing of primary research results on the web
as efficient, fast and inexpensive as possible by making appropriate use of
web technologies. This, combined with the avoidance of the costs associated
with typesetting, printing, distribution and subscription collection make
the process of publishing primary research results in BioMed Central very
inexpensive. We will offer the service of publishing primary research free
to authors.
We plan to make our revenue by offering additional services on the BioMed
Central site that will guide scientists to the most important information.
This is an area where we believe that there is a real opportunity for
publishers to add value. BioMed Central will provide intelligent and
systematic commentary and reviews, news and alerting services, databases
with strong editorial component, and e-commerce services. These services
will charge a subscription or per usage fee. Some of these services may be
free to academics, and will charge only to commercial users (as SwissProt
[
http://www.expasy.ch/sprot/sprot-top.html] does currently, for example).
Our commercial success will depend on our ability to provide the services
members of the community need and want at prices they are prepared to pay.
In the future we may offer paid services to authors, when requested, such as
copy editing manuscripts by authors with insufficient command of English,
help with manuscript mark-up for web publication (when authors prefer not to
do this themselves using utilities we will provide for that purpose) and
others.
Overall, BioMed Central plans to redefine the role of commercial scientific
publishers by focusing on adding value, and offering services which
complement the freely available original research literature of the future.
Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any further questions or
would like to make any comments or suggestions.
Mike Brown
Customer Services Director
http://www.biomedcentral.com
http://current-science-group.com
email - mike_at_biomedcentral.com
Tel - +44 (0)20 7323 0323
Fax - +44 (0)20 7580 1938
Received on Mon Jan 24 2000 - 19:17:43 GMT