20 December 2002

Season's Greetings from all of us at  BioMed Central

BioMed Central is at the forefront of change in the world of publishing, offering a diverse range of electronic products. These quarterly updates will keep you up to date with all the new developments at BioMed Central.  We hope you find them useful and we would appreciate your feedback.  

Contents

Over 75 members have now joined BioMed Central's  Institutional Membership Program

Introduced in January 2002, the BioMed Central Institutional Membership Program gives institutions a way to actively support open access, and to effect change in the way that scientific research is published, priced and disseminated. 

Over 75 institutions have now joined the program including, all ten sites of the University of California.  Other prestigious American institutions to have joined include:

Harvard, Brown, Cornell , Columbia , Rockefeller and Princeton universities (for a complete list of member institutions visit our membership pages).  

If you would like more information on how to join this program, please contact our Membership Director, Becky Fishman 

Use our Advocacy Kit to help spread the word

BioMed Central has launched an Advocacy Kit to provide supporters and advocates of open access with the necessary tools to help spread the word about BioMed Central and open access publishing in general. The kit consists of a host of resources, such as presentations, a newsletter article, posters etc., which you can use to help educate faculty colleagues and administrators at your institution about the importance of creating change in scholarly communication by publishing in open access research journals.

We hope that you will find the Advocacy Kit useful and urge you to use the resources to help gain the support of colleagues for open access journals.

For further information visit our advocacy pages. 

Partnership with INIST-CNRS will create a new national archive of open access research

BioMed Central and INIST (Institut de l’Information Scientifique et Technique) are set to create a new archive of open access research. Currently, all the research articles published in BioMed Central’s journals are archived, without delay, at the United States National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central site. The INIST national archive will be another way in which the information published in BioMed Central's journals is securely archived.

For further information read the press release.

Librarians can now view their institution's usage statistics for all BioMed Central subscription products.  If your institution  subscribes to any BioMed Central product, you can now view the usage statistics when YOU want to see them, without having to wait for a report to be sent to you.

Please note that this service is only available to those people who have identified themselves to us as the main library contact at each institution.

To view your subscription usage statistics visit our subscriptions page.

If you have already registered on BioMed Central, log in here to view your usage statistics for both our open access journals and subscription products.

If you have not yet registered, visit http://www.biomedcentral.com/registration/ and click on the ‘Register Me’ button to get to the registration form.  You can then use your e-mail and password to gain access to your statistics.

Online access to Current Drugs review  journals is now available on BioMed Central

BioMed Central now gives access to the online version of Current Drugs review journals comprising up-to-date, peer-reviewed scientific journals, that provide scientists with an easy way to remain informed of all the latest developments within their fields of interest. 

The series includes these titles: 

• Current Opinion in Drug Discovery & Development  
• Current Opinion in Investigational Drugs  
• Current Opinion in Molecular Therapeutics 
• IDrugs: The Investigational Drugs Journal 

For further information on these journals visit our website.

Faculty of 1000 wins the ALPSP award for publishing innovation

BioMed Central's literature awareness and reviewing service, Faculty of 1000, has been recognized by The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers as the most innovative publication of 2002. 

To find out more read the press release

Register for 30-day Free Trials

To access the current issue go to http://jbiol.com, here you can also sign up for your own print issue.  

Please alert your researchers to this new journal launch which provides a home for exceptional biological research with all the benefits of open access. 

Research Information 

An interesting open access journal for librarians and information professionals, which allows you to apply for a free print subscription.

Science.gov

Science.gov is a gateway to authoritative selected science information provided by U.S. Government agencies, including research and development results.

Read the latest article on open access publishing reproduced with kind permission from the publishers of He@lth Information on the Internet.

Averting the crisis in medical publishing - open access journals.
Gordon Fletcher
He@lth Information on the Internet 
December 2002; (30):6-7

If you would like us to mail you a copy of our 2003 catalogue, e-mail your request to us  indicating which format you would prefer, electronic or print.

Conference Attendance

BioMed Central will be at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia (24-27 Jan).

Please contact us for an appointment or just drop by booth 1245 

We look forward to meeting you!