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Biomed Central - Peer Reviewed Open Access Publishing on the Internet 

Some of the world's leading biological and medical scientists have joined the Editorial Directorate of BioMed Central, a new publishing house that will give free on-line access to biomedical research. BioMed Central will allow researchers around the world to access peer-reviewed research articles free-of-charge, and without the traditional barriers to access imposed by conventional publishers. TheBioMed Central Directorate includes:

• PROFESSOR ELIZABETH H BLACKBURN
  Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics and Professor of Microbiology and Immunology
  University of California, San Francisco (USA)
• DR STEVEN E HYMAN
  Director
  National Institute of Mental Health (USA)
• PROFESSOR MARC W KIRSCHNER
  Head of the Department of Cell Biology
  Harvard Medical School. (USA)
• PROFESSOR PHILIPPE KOURILSKY
  Professor of the College de France and
  Director General of the Pasteur Institute (France)
• PROFESSOR JOSEPH BOYD MARTIN
  Dean of the Faculty of Medicine
  Harvard Medical School (USA)
• DR DAVID G NATHAN
  President
  Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (USA)
• DR PAUL NURSE
  Director-General
  Imperial Cancer Research Fund (UK).
• DR HAROLD E VARMUS
  President
  Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (USA)
• PROFESSOR SIR DAVID WEATHERALL
  Regius Professor of Medicine
  University of Oxford (UK)
• PROFESSOR MITSUHIRO YANAGIDA
  Professor of Kyoto University, Graduate School of Biostudies (Japan)

"BioMed Central will be the most significant development for disseminating the results of biomedical research in our lifetime", says Dr Paul Nurse. "BioMed Central and other on-line initiatives will serve to make science more democratic, and more efficient, and in so doing will speed scientific progress," says Dr Steven Hyman. "In the long run, I think that journals that are not freely available in electronic formats will be read less and less".

"By fully co-ordinating with the PubMed Central archive, BioMed Central has the potential to demonstrate how high quality, peer reviewed reports in many important fields of life sciences can be made freely accessible throughout the world solely through electronic journals," says Dr Harold Varmus. "If this works as hoped, we will move much closer to achieving the revolution in scientific publishing that the Internet promises."

A few more researchers and clinicians are expected to join the Directorate over the coming weeks. The Directorate will supervise the editorial and scientific integrity of BioMed Central and the activities of the many hundreds of editors, referees and reporters. The directorate will also oversee the continued development of the BioMed Central publishing plan which includes publishing subscription-free journals in all areas of biology and medicine as well as providing other information resources, databases and other services relevant to the biomedical community on a subscription basis. All primary research published by BioMed Central will be made available free and placed immediately and full in PubMed Central, the NIH-sponsored archive of biomedical research. Authors will retain the copyright for their work and will be allowed to distribute their work however they see fit including archiving it on their own website.

Many of the issues that have arisen as a result of the advent of open-access publishing will be discussed at a conference on 6-7 July 2000 at the New York Academy of Medicine, USA."Freedom of information: the impact of open-access on biomedical science" will discuss the impact that this new publishing model will have on science and how it is used, communicated and done. How open-access publishing will change the relationship between science and the general public will also be discussed at the conference.