Standards and affiliations
Publishing standards
BioMed Central is committed to maintaining high standards through full and stringent peer review.
All research articles in BioMed Central's journals receive rapid and thorough peer review. The detailed peer-review policy of each journal is the responsibility of the journal editor(s) concerned. Many journals operate traditional anonymous peer review. Others, including the medical BMC-series titles, operate 'open peer review', in which reviewers are asked to sign their reviews. For these titles, the pre-publication history of each paper (including submitted versions, reviewers' reports and authors' responses) is linked to from the published article.
OASPA
BioMed Central is a founder member of OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association), which is an organisation set up to support and represent the interests of open access journal publishers in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines.
COPE
BioMed Central is a member of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), which is a charity registered in the UK. It is concerned with the integrity of peer-reviewed publications in science, particularly biomedicine.
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual works, whether they are owned or public-domain. Authors publishing with BioMed Central retain the copyright to their work, licensing it under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). This license allows articles to be freely downloaded from the BioMed Central website, and also allows articles and data to be re-used and re-distributed without restriction, as long as the original work is correctly cited.
Technical standards
Crossref/DOI
We assign a DOI to each of our articles and submit these to be recorded permanently by CrossRef- the official DOI link registry agency for scholarly and professional publishers. This allows linking from a reference citation on one platform to another, and ensure that if an article is moved to a different location at some point in the future (or its URL is changed), the original link will still take the user to the new location.
Counter
Project Counter was devised to standardise the way the Publishers recorded and display statistics. Our usage statistics are COUNTER-compliant.
RSS
We syndicate all of our articles automatically using RSS, enabling us to instantly distribute articles and keep readers up to date with what we are publishing.
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