Press releases

10 March 2005

Wolfram Publicon® gives new momentum to Open Access publishing

Wolfram Research and BioMed Central today announced a partnership to streamline Open Access publishing. Using Wolfram Research's new Wolfram Publicon software, authors gain the unique advantage of being able to submit properly structured documents ready for direct publication by BioMed Central, the leading Open Access publisher.

Open Access publishing provides free access to published material, while authors pay a small fee to cover editing, review, and publishing. Publicon gives editing and formatting tools directly to authors so that submissions go through the online publishing process with minimum intervention.

Publicon simplifies the process of writing and formatting technical documents in XML, XHTML, and MathML. Built-in style sheets and the user-friendly interface eliminate all the extra effort normally spent readying a paper for publication. As a result, BioMed Central and other publishers can rely on receiving properly formatted documents created in Publicon. Such an effective system significantly reduces the time and costs behind publishing important Open Access research.

"Publicon was created primarily for electronic publishing and is ideal for implementing the Open Access publishing model," said André Kuzniarek, manager of document technology at Wolfram Research. "It helps the STM publishing community simplify its publication processes, and our partnership with BioMed Central signifies a serious step forward in making it easy and affordable for authors to share their work with a broad base of peers."

"Parts of the current publishing process are slower and more costly than they should be because the formats that users normally submit in, like Microsoft Word, do not have enough structure to allow reliable XML to be extracted automatically - the information is simply presented too ambiguously," said Matthew Cockerill, technical director at BioMed Central.

As part of this partnership, Publicon is being offered at a specially discounted price. In addition, BioMed Central is giving a discount off the article processing charge to authors who submit their work using Publicon. See http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/ifora/publicon for further details.

Publicon is available for Windows and Mac OS X. More product details can be found at: http://www.wolfram.com/publicon

BioMed Central, the Open Access publisher (http://www.biomedcentral.com/), is an independent online publishing house committed to providing immediate access without charge to the peer-reviewed biological and medical research it publishes. This commitment is based on the view that open access to research is essential to the rapid and efficient communication of science. In addition to open access original research, BioMed Central also publishes reviews and other subscription-based content.

Wolfram Research is the world's leading developer of computational software for science and technology, offering organization-wide computing solutions. Led by Mathematica, its flagship product, the company's software is relied on today by several million enthusiastic users around the world and has been the recipient of many industry awards. Wolfram Research was founded in 1987 by Stephen Wolfram, who continues to lead the company today. The company is headquartered in the United States, with offices in Europe and Japan. Go to http://www.wolfram.com/ for more information about Wolfram Research and its products.

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Press contacts: Ben Wilson Wolfram Research 217-398-0700 ext. 3189 press@wolfram.com

Grace Baynes BioMed Central +44 (0) 20 7631 9988 press@biomedcentral.com

© 2005 Wolfram Research, Inc. Mathematica and Publicon are registered trademarks of Wolfram Research, Inc. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. Mathematica is not associated with Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. or MathTech, Inc. Mac OS is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries.