As the pioneer of open access publishing and an official sponsor of Open Access Week 2012, BioMed Central is participating in various activities around the globe for Open Access Week and beyond. BioMed Central supports open access, in all its forms, and is at the cutting edge of ensuring that the results of scientific research are made openly available internationally.
Open Access Week (organized by SPARC and now entering its sixth year) is a global opportunity for the academic and research community to enhance their knowledge of the benefits of open access, to share what they've learned with colleagues, and to inspire wider participation in making open access the norm in scholarship and research.
BioMed Central's Managing Director, Matthew Cockerill comments, "Open Access Week is great opportunity to spread the word about open access, and BioMed Central is delighted to be an official sponsor this year. The UK has played a leading role in open access developments this year, with the publication of the Finch Report and new initiatives on open access from both Research Councils UK and the Wellcome Trust. But the international nature of Open Access Week demonstrates that growing support for open access publishing is a truly global phenomenon."
BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Medicine, today publishes research that reports the growing volume of scientific articles published in full immediate open access journals during the period 2000-2011. Mikael Laakso and Bo-Christer Björk from Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland, found that open access journal publishing is disrupting the dominant subscription-based model of scientific publishing, and the annual share of published journal articles published in immediate open access journals has grown rapidly during the last decade.
BMC Medicine will be hosting a Tweet Chat around this article, on Friday the 26th October at 12pm (GMT) for an hour, join the conversation here, #BMCMed.
BioMed Central went mobile last week in a move which promotes open access to scientific research on the move. All BioMed Central journal websites now offer users on mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablet computers, an enhanced experience when viewing full text articles, making better use of small screen sizes and touch-screen functionality. Using a 'responsive' web design, article pages now automatically respond to the capabilities of the device that is being used, providing a mobile-optimized appearance.
Follow @BioMed Central on Twitter, and keep an eye on the #OAweek2012 hash tag for the latest on what we are up to during Open Access Week. You can show your support for open access by downloading one of our Open Access Week posters and displaying it in your institution. Or why not nominate one of our articles for one of the BioMed Central Research Awards, which celebrate some of the most groundbreaking open access research published in BioMed Central's 200+ journals.