How good is your open access knowledge?

Think. Check. Submit.

A new cross-industry campaign has recently launched to help researchers choose where to submit - Think. Check. Submit. The campaign will provide information for researchers, through an online hub at www.thinkchecksubmit.org, about the criteria they should look for when selecting where to publish their research. The volume of research output continues to grow, and recent years have seen an increase in new publishing services and outlets. At the same time, we hear increasing stories of malpractice, or deceptive publishing, but little in the way of guidance exists when it comes to choosing a journal to publish in. Think. Check. Submit. is a new campaign led by representatives from organizations across the industry: ALPSP, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), INASP, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, ISSN, LIBER, OASPA, UKSG and individual publishers including BioMed Central. The campaign will help researchers understand their options, and key criteria they can check before making an informed decision about where to submit. More information can be found here.

How good is your Open Access knowledge?

This October also marked the seventh global Open Access Week. BioMed Central were the first publisher to make open access a commercial success, and we have been publishing via an open access model for 15 years now. Our blogs during Open Access Week featured stories from some of the many organizations we work with to promote open research, including charities, librarians, societies and institutions. Why not learn more from our timeline of open access history, and then test yourself on the subject by taking our quiz. Don’t forget to share your score!

Open Access Landscape Update

If you’re wondering whether you are eligible for funding to help with the cost of APCs, funds may be available. First, you should check whether your institution is part of our membership scheme. We have 567 organizations and institutions who have signed up as members to cover all or part of their researchers’ APCs. We also provideautomatic waivers for authors from low income, or lower-middle income economies. Anyone can apply to us for a waiver if they do not have funding, regardless of where in the world they are based. In addition, as of October 2015 we have identified 87 APC funds provided by funding bodies, and 125 institutional APC funds that are funded in whole or in part by the institution, with a further 86 institutional APC funds that solely distribute OA block funds from research funders. 32% of open access funders prefer or mandate the CC BY license which BioMed Central uses (and all funders permit this license). This month, the University of California, Berkeley has reopened its institutional OA fund, and Parkinson’s UK has joined the Charity Open Access Fund (COAF).

A round up of our blogs

October was a busy month for our networkwith a wide range of blogs posted including a challenging quiz about antimicrobial resistance, a discussion on reversingclimate change and a look at the past, present and future of epidemics, all forBiology Week. We also highlighted some exciting new research findings. There were interesting posts about how food affects your mood from research published inBMC Psychiatry and how beluga whalesmay give themselves names from the author of research published inZoological Letters. And where there are humans, there are bacteria - even in space! But what can we learn from the microbiome of dust particles collected from a space station? Plus following on from research published in BMC Evolutionary Biology, we asked: does an elephant ever stop growing? In addition, there was a fantastic read for those that have recently started a PhD and how finding your feet can be difficult. Finally, don’t miss out on howpatient and public involvement is evolving in research, or our podcast on infection prevention and control in hospitals from a nurse's perspective.

BioMed Central in the News

Climate change could benefit northern lizards Research published in BMC Evolutionary Biology this month found that higher temperatures result in Swedish sand lizards laying their eggs earlier, which leads to better fitness and survival in their offspring. The findings indicate that climate change could have positive effects on this population of high-latitude lizard, but the authors warned that climate change is likely to affect a whole suite of traits, in addition to egg-laying date, which together would have an unknown combined effect on survival and reproductive success. The paper, which can be found here, was covered by 72 media outlets globally, including the highly influential National Public Radio which syndicates to 797 regional radio stations across the USA.

Open Science Prize launches

Our friends at The Wellcome Trust asked us to let you know about The Open Science Prize, a new prize challenging innovators from around the world to unleash the huge potential of open access content and data for societal benefit. The prize has been launched by the Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative of the National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The Open Science Prize invites technology experts and inventive researchers to come forward with new ideas for services, tools, and platforms that will make it easier for academic scientists, citizen scientists, innovators and the wider public to discover and mine the vast treasure troves of digital information being generated through health research. The competition seeks international teams to create novel open science platforms. The Open Science Prize is open for entries until 29 February 2016. Further information is available at: openscienceprize.org Please see also the NIH press release and the Wellcome Trust Blog

BioMed Central on the road

American College of Rheumatology annual meeting San Francisco, USA 6 - 11 November American Academy of Ophthalmology Las Vegas, USA 14 - 17 November Radiological Society of North America Chicago, USA 29 November - 4 December

Supplements

Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition published abstracts from the Twelfth International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) Conference and Expo. Journal of Foot and Ankle Researchpublished abstracts from the Australasian Podiatry Conference 2015. Addiction Science & Clinical Practicepublished abstracts from the 12th International Network on Brief Interventions for Alcohol (INEBRIA) Congress. Italian Journal of Pediatrics published abstracts from the XXI Congress of the Italian Society of Neonatology. Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica published meeting abstracts from Animal Obesity - causes, consequences and comparative aspects. BMC Bioinformatics published proceedings of the 12th Annual MCBIOS (The MidSouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society) Conference. Pediatric Rheumatology published abstracts from the 8th International Congress of Familial Mediterranean Fever and Systemic Autoinflammatory Diseases. Critical Care published abstracts from the Eighth International Symposium on Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine for Latin America. Italian Journal of Pediatrics published abstracts from the 71st Congress of the Italian Society of Pediatrics. BMC Bioinformatics and BMC Genomicspublished proceedings of the 13th Annual Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB) Satellite Workshop on Comparative Genomics.

BioMed Central is an open access publisher of science, technology and medicine. We have 286 open access, online, peer-reviewed journals. Find out which are relevant to you and your research here.


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