BioMed Central: The future

Matthew CockerillBioMed Central Editors’ Day

30th May 2012

Georgetown University, Washington DC

• “Academic Spring” has kept open access in the news

• David Willetts (UK Science Minister), voiced strong support for OA , and announced involvement of Jimmy Wales in policy development

• UK’s Finch working group into scholarly communication due to deliver report imminently

• Whitehouse.gov petition opened last week seeking 25,000 signatories (now at 19,000)

• Horizon 2020 - €80bn EU research funding program to extend pilot OA program from FP7 to cover all projects

• World Bank announced strategic program to deliver open access to all its published output

• Wellcome Trust is planning to introduce sanctions to increase 55% compliance rate with its OA policy

• RCUK and Wellcome plan to require grantees to make deposited research openly licensed (Creative Commons)

A busy Spring for Open Access

2008 2009 2010 2011 20120

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Comparison of YTD manuscript submissions to BioMed Central journals (Jan 1-May 17)

22.5%

19.9%

• Two high profile departures from PLoS (Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing and Pete Binfield, Publisher, PLoS One)

eLife – high-end OA journal backed by Wellcome, Max Planck and HHMI, to launch later this year. Has hired Mark Patterson from PLoS as Managing Executive Editor, and more recently Ian Mulvany from Mendeley as Head of Technology

PeerJ – mysterious new OA startup involving Peter Binfield

News from the OA competition

A sign of changing times

Question to Philip Campbell, Editor-in-Chief of Nature, at a recent panel session:

“Do you expect Open Access to dominate biomedical publishing in the future?”Answer:

“In a word, yes”

Editor’s Day 2011

More than 90,000 peer-reviewed OA articles published to date

215 open access journals Existing titles are growing ~20%/year Growth via new launches and acquisition

of existing titles is also accelerating 11 titles added in 2010 >20 journals will launch during 2011 Publishing team responsible for journal

development has been hugely expanded

Editor’s Day 2012 More than 90,000 125,000 peer-reviewed

OA articles published to date 215 236 open access journals Existing titles are growing ~20%/year Growth via new launches and acquisition

of existing titles is also accelerating 11 titles added in 2010 >20 30 journals will launch during 2011

2012 Publishing team responsible for journal

development has been hugely expanded

Staying ahead with technology

Increased development resources

Additional development team at Springer’s location in Pune, India

Approximately doubles total size of development team

Close collaboration with London team on both projects and fixes

What could we do better?

Performance of editor tools

Has not been what is should be - a particular problem for some journals

Need to prevent inefficient code slipping through

What are we doing about it? Fixing existing performance problems Improved monitoring of performance of tools, as

seen by editors Trend monitoring of test servers so degradation of

performance is fixed before it goes live

Production process Moving to a Springer’s main supplier (SPi) for

production services ongoing since March Transition has not been as smooth as we would

have liked: capacity-planning issues with supplier, and some technical delays

This has led to buildup of articles awaiting publication and/or final version

What are we doing about it? Accelerated delivery of new production tools

which improve efficiency Additional staffing at SPi and BioMed Central

Long term benefits of new production process

Greater scalability as we grow Quicker initial publication of author version Support for “final form first” where needed Fewer rounds of corrections for authors,

most fixes done by vendor Support for embargoed publication Multiple vendors (including specialists

focused on Math/TeX)

Some technical improvements which rolled out since last

Editor’s Day

New platform – Dec 2011

Contact management

Improved tools for Section Editors and other editorial roles

Editorial role improvements

Assign more than one editor to a single manuscript within specified roles e.g. Lead Guest Editor and Guest Editor, Managing Editor and Associate Editor

Additional information regarding available editors when assigning MS– Affiliation– Journal specific keywords– Editor’s current manuscript load

Increased flexibility in signatures, multiple variables can be used in each template, rather than just ‘Journal signature’ or ‘Editor signature’

Increased flexibility with which roles receive copies of which email notifications

Additional flexibility for ‘editorial models’

Customization of how peer review status is displayed to authors, in “My Manuscripts”

Custom email templates for each type of manuscripts reassignment

e.g. a custom template for when a Section Editor assigns an Associate Editor

A different template for when an EiC assigns a Guest Editor

Reviewers can submit reports without login!

DOCX/PPTX support

Tables

We now have full support for complex table formatting (CALS)

No more authors complaining that they can’t have vertical lines or colored cells

MathJaX – high quality equations

What’s round the corner?

Transition to Linux

Open source More robust, secure and reliable Better performance and scalability Easier to roll out to ‘The Cloud’ Now in final testing Rollout in later June/ early July Should be invisible to users

Optimizing article display on mobile/touch devices

Optimized display on mobile

Pinch and zoom

Cases Database

About Cases Database Good example of reuse enabled by open access Aggregating large numbers of case reports adds

value Test case for TEMIS semantic-tagging

technologies (which have potential wider use) Encourages further case report submissions If you receive a case report outside your journal’s

scope, offer authors transfer to Journal of Medical Case Reports or BMC Research Notes!

Public launch in September Link to demo

Video

Better integration of video

We already generate thumbnails and embed videos natively via Quicktime

New surgical video case report project will have benefits for all journals

We will convert all videos into standard YouTube/iPhone compatible form, so will work on all platforms with no plug-ins

Manuscript transfer tools

Manuscript transfer tools

Avoiding wasting reviewers’ and authors’ time

Solves dilemma for Editors seeking to improve Impact Factor of journal

Allows publishable research to be redirected to a more suitable outlet

Transfer possible pre- or post- review It went live yesterday, and is about to be

piloted by a few “guinea pig” journals

Workflow 2.0

Major improvements to the back end tools used by BioMed Central and its editors to manage peer review

Production phase now in active real-world use

Editorial tools are next!

Open Data

Open Data

Sponsored by

Article metrics

Further metrics on the way

Full graphing of access stats, including PubMed Central

Comprehensive harvesting of blogs, tweets and media mentions

Article level citation counts from WoS, Scopus, Google Scholar, Crossref, PubMed Central

Sign up for alerts when cited

Article impact award

Use article metrics to highlight the research with greatest ‘real world impact’ as part of next year’s research awards