BioMed Central opens access to Chemistry articles

Open access publisher BioMed Central has launched Chemistry Central, a site that the London based company hopes will see chemistry become as prolific in the open access arena as physics.

Access to Chemistry Central, and its sister site BioMed Central is available through a newly-launched portal, Open Access Central, which will provide a single point of access to all the publisher’s open access journals. A new site, PhysMath Central, is also planned for physics and mathematics.

"There are plenty of opportunities for physicists to publish their findings using the open access model," said BioMed publisher Matthew Cockerill, but chemistry had lagged behind. He hopes the launch of Chemistry Central will change that: “We want open access to spread to as wide an audience as possible.”

Chemistry Central will make it possible for researchers both to publish articles in existing journals and to set up their own journals. Currently, said Cockerill, the majority of BioMed Central’s 60 journals are published by specialists outside of BioMed Central.

Some groups chose to administer the process of running the journals themselves, using BioMed Central’s tools, said Cockerill, while others left most of the administration to the publisher. “The cost of running the journal is covered by the article processing charges, paid by the author’s institution or funding sponsor,” he added.

Cockerill said that the future of scientific publishing lay in open access: “Publishers need to adapt to the reality of what the web means for publishing scientific findings. In 2000 BioMed Central was a very new model. It had a slow start but we’ve had increasing enthusiasm as scientists started to see the benefits. We’ve seen a doubling every 18 months of the number of articles submitted to our journals.”

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