Ross Upshur

Director, Primary Care Research Unit, Department of Family and Community Medicine, Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre, Toronto, ON M4N 3M5, Canada

Ross Upshur received BA (Hons.) and MA degrees in philosophy before receiving his MD from McMaster University in 1986. After 7 years of rural primary care practice he returned to complete his MSc in epidemiology and fellowship training in Community Medicine at the University of Toronto. He is currently the director of the Primary Care Research Unit at the Sunnybrook Campus of the Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre.

Positions held:

Director, Primary Care Research Unit
Department of Family and Community Medicine
Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre

Assistant Professor
Departments of Family and Community Medicine and Public
Health Sciences

Member, Joint Centre for Bioethics
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Geology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

What prompted you to submit an article?

I was excited by the promise of rapid peer review and publication. I was also impressed by the direct links to PUBMED.

What was your assessment of the electronic submission and peer review process?

I find BioMed Central a superb publisher to work with. It has, perhaps, the most flawless electronic submission process I have experienced with very few glitches and crashes. Peer review is prompt and has been, for the most part, constructive and led to improvements in the papers submitted. The other chief virtue of BMC journals is their speed of review and very little lag time for publication. This reduces the wait for papers to appear in the literature. Indeed, one of our papers was cited by another BMC paper 3 days after it was posted, a time span inconceivable in print based journals. I think open peer review allows for a more collegial process of review, and as the reviews and responses are posted it allows readers to fully understand the transformation of the original manuscript into the final manuscript.

What do you think you gained from publishing in an open access journal?

I believe an online open access journal extends the range of readership beyond the confines of libraries and subscriptions and truly opens up global communication of scientific ideas.