Ursula D'Souza

Ph.D, Lecturer in Molecular Genetics, Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry (SGDP) Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, London

“We have chosen to publish in BMC Molecular Biology so that this important new scientific information will be disseminated as quickly as possible.”

What is your field of study?

I instruct Ph.D. students on common mental health disorders that include depression, addiction, dementia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and schizophrenia. My background is in brain chemistry and molecular genetics and my research area of specialty is molecular pharmacology in the clinical setting. I have published in both print and online peer-reviewed journals, including Biological Psychiatry and BioMed Central’s BMC Genetics.

What do you think of BioMed Central?

I first published in BMC Genetics in 2005 after 13 years of publishing in subscription, print-based journals. What I found remarkable about the acceptance of the article, [“Transient expression analysis of allelic variants of a VNTR in the dopamine transporter gene,”] was that the results of the study were negative. Negative results are unlikely to be highly cited by other researchers. The willingness of editors at BMC Genetics to publish findings that would most often be dismissed for reasons related to publishing rather than science impressed me. I actually found that negative findings do gather citation rates when the information is made freely available online. My paper has been cited about 10 times since its publication—a good rate for negative findings. I attribute the high citation rate to the open access policy of BMC Genetics.

What are your thoughts on open access publishing?

As a peer reviewer for the journal BMC Molecular Biology, I have found that the peer review process takes place much more rapidly with online open access journals than it does with their counterparts in print. An article can be published in an open access journal whenever the peer review process is complete, shaving six months to two years off the publishing cycle and communicating valuable scientific information as soon as it is available.

What are BMC’s main strengths when compared to traditional publishing models?

Time considerations played a part in my decision to use BioMed Central to publish upcoming research results that offer a new piece of evidence essential for taking work forward in molecular studies. We have chosen to publish in BMC Molecular Biology so that this important new scientific information will be disseminated as quickly as possible.