Yoshihide Hayashizaki

Director of the RIKEN Omics Science Center, Yokohama, Japan Co-ordinator of the FANTOM4 companion articles series published in BioMed Central

FANTOM (Functional Annotation Of Mammalian genome), one of the core activities at the RIKEN Omics Science Center, is an international research consortium founded in the year 2000 to assign functional annotations to the full-length complementary DNAs (cDNAs) that were collected during the Mouse Encyclopaedia Project at RIKEN. As of April 2009, 15 countries, and 51 institutions from Japan and other countries, participate in the FANTOM project

The FANTOM4 companion papers were published in BioMed Central journals including Genome Biology, BMC Bioinformatics and BMC Cell Biology.

The FANTOM4 article series was coordinated by Yoshihide Hayashizaki, Director of the RIKEN Omics Science Center in Yokohama. We spoke to him about why he choose to publish this article series with BioMed Central:

“The FANTOM consortium recently finalized its fourth project. In the previous three projects we were able to analyze different elements of the genomic information. For The FANTOM4 project, we had a different approach. We worked for several years on our analysis using next generation sequencing technology and managed to open the door to a new field of transcriptional network analysis.

When considering where to submit a big variety of results from this large scale project we were looking for a publisher that could offer us high visibility and be able to publish articles from several different fields within genome research. We also wanted to have these articles collected in one place so that readers could easily access them. BioMed Central offered us to publish our results in several of their journals, and to collect the articles in a special FANTOM4 website. This gave us exactly what we needed.

The communication with the Editors at the BioMed Central was very smooth throughout the whole process and the publication procedure was extremely fast. Now, several of the articles published in BioMed Central are highly accessed.

The open access policy of BioMed Central journals make it possible for all the world to access our results immediately after publication, something that benefits both us as authors and the readers.”

All articles in the FANTOM4 series can be accessed from our website