Matthew Cockerill, BMC Bioinformatics comes of age, BMC Bioinformatics, June 7, 2005. Excerpt: 'Almost exactly five years ago, in early June 2000, BMC Bioinformatics received its first submission. Five years on, it has received over a thousand submissions, and the journal is continuing to grow rapidly....In the past few months, developments have included a refreshed international editorial board, which now consists of over 50 leaders in the field, and a Bioinformatics and Genomics gateway that brings together relevant content from across BioMed Central's 130+ Open Access journals. And by the time you read this, BMC Bioinformatics should have its first official ISI Impact Factor....Looking back over the first 5 years of the journal, are any significant trends evident? One thing that is noticeable is the prevalence of the open-source model of software development. In fact more than 10% of all BMC Bioinformatics articles include the term "open-source". Hundreds of open-source bioinformatics projects are now hosted on sites such as bioinformatics.org and sourceforge.net. No doubt the similar philosophies of open-source software and Open Access publishing have been a factor in making BMC Bioinformatics one of BioMed Central's most successful journals....Imagine what could be achieved if articles, rather than consisting entirely of free-form natural language, contained explicit assertions about biological knowledge in unambiguous, machine-readable form. This is the oft-vaunted promise of the 'Semantic Web', but it has proved to be very difficult to realize in practice. Some recent developments, however, suggest that progress is being made. For example, this editorial was created using Publicon -- a new breed of scientific authoring tool developed by Wolfram Research with input from BioMed Central. Publicon...can not only output BioMed Central's native article XML format, but also embed mathematical equations as 'islands' of semantically-rich MathML.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/10/2005 09:52:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
