Open Access, Open Peer Review, and Open Data: 15 years of Experience at BioMed Central Todd Hummel, Editorial Director, Clinical Medicine ABEC, November 2014 Open access, open peer review, and open data

Outline

• Our experience with open access • Our experience with open peer review • Our experience with open data Open access, open peer review, and open data

Open Access Open access, open peer review, and open data

Open Access Publishing, then and now…

2000 2014 Open access, open peer review, and open data

About BioMed Central

• Global publisher of peer-reviewed open access on-line journals • Publish more than 270 open access journals • Part of Springer Science+Business Media Open access, open peer review, and open data

About BioMed Central

• Member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) • Follow the COPE Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors

• Founding Member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association • Part of OASPA’s mission is to promote a uniform definition of OA publishing, best practices for maintaining and disseminating OA scholarly communications, and ethical standards Open access, open peer review, and open data

About our journals

BMC Series Journals

• “The BMC series publishes subject- specific journals focused on the needs of individual research communities across all areas of biology and medicine. We offer an efficient, fair and friendly peer review service, and are committed to publishing all sound science, provided that there is some advance in knowledge presented by the work. We are innovative in our approach to peer review and publication, promoting transparency, and working with our authors, editors and reviewers to make scientific knowledge widely available.” Open access, open peer review, and open data

About our journals

• Publish peer-reviewed original research and review content

• External Editors-in-Chief

• Proprietary or published on behalf of our partners

• Span a variety of subject areas in medicine and biological sciences

Open access, open peer review, and open data

Growth of OA at BioMed Central

BioMed Central submissions 70000 60000 50000 40000 30000 20000 10000 0 Open access, open peer review, and open data

7 million users access BioMed Central’s journal websites every month Open access, open peer review, and open data

95,476,933 BioMedCentral visits in 2013

Source: Urchin Open access, open peer review, and open data

Open Peer Review Open access, open peer review, and open data

What is Open Peer Review at BioMed Central?

BioMed Central’s Definition ‘Open peer review’ means that, firstly, the reviewers’ names are included on the peer review reports, and secondly that, if the manuscript is published, the reports are made available online along with the final version of the manuscript. The published article will provide a link to its ‘pre-publication history,’ which lists all the versions of the manuscript, all the signed reviews, and all responses to the reviewers since the submission of the manuscript until its publication. Open access, open peer review, and open data

Open Peer Review at BioMed Central

• Currently more than 60 journals operate under open peer review • BioMed Central has published journals with open peer review since 2000 • About 35,000 papers have been published at BioMed Central using open peer review

Open access, open peer review, and open data

BMC Series

• The 44 medical titles within the BMC series operate with open peer review and have since the very first titles in the series were launched in 2000 • Each published article has a link to its pre-publication history, which includes all submitted versions of the manuscript, reviewer names and reports, and author responses

Open access, open peer review, and open data

Open access, open peer review, and open data

How Does This Work?

Open access, open peer review, and open data Open access, open peer review, and open data

Open access, open peer review, and open data

Open access, open peer review, and open data

Open access, open peer review, and open data

Open access, open peer review, and open data

Disadvantages of Open Peer Review

•Possible delay in securing reviewers •General unease among potential reviewers with publishing their names •Possibility of author/reviewer contact

Open access, open peer review, and open data

Advantages of Open Peer Review

•Transparency to authors, reviewers, and readers •Accountability •Reviewer acknowledgment •Constructive versus destructive criticism

Open access, open peer review, and open data

What’s the Feedback?

“The comments from referees were very useful.” BMC Ophthalmology “Fast and serious peer review, I do appreciate very much the reviewers comments.”

“We are very happy with the transparent peer BMC Psychiatry review process that is applied in the BMC series. This results in more objective reviewer comments.” BMC Cardiovascular Disorders “I especially appreciated the transparency of the review process, with the reviewers' names disclosed to the authors.” “I really like your prepublication features. Long BMC Infectious Diseases live openness!” BMC Health Services Research Open access, open peer review, and open data

Open Data Open access, open peer review, and open data

What is Open Data at BioMed Central?

BioMed Central’s Definition “…data are freely available on the public internet permitting any user to download, copy, analyse, re-process, pass them to software or use them for any other purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.” Open access, open peer review, and open data

Why Open Data?

• Communicating results is the final step in the research process • How has this historically been done? • Journal articles • Poster/oral presentations at conferences • In conversations with colleagues Open access, open peer review, and open data

Funders and Data

• US National Institutes of Health “Data should be made as widely and freely available as possible while safeguarding the privacy of participants, and protecting confidential and proprietary data.” • Wellcome Trust “All our funded researchers should maximise access to their research data with as few restrictions as possible.” • Gates Foundation “By sharing high quality data, we and our partners can better understand the problems we are trying to solve while developing more efficient and effective strategies to overcome them. “

Open access, open peer review, and open data

Data reuse @BioMedCentral

• Strong encouragement to authors of all journals to provide underlying datasets • Required deposition for select journals: • Genome Biology • Genome Medicine • Mobile DNA • Malaria Journal • Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases • Arthritis Research & Therapy • GigaScience

Open access, open peer review, and open data

BioMed Central and Open Data

GigaScience publishes ‘big-data’ studies from the entire spectrum of life sciences

Editor-in-Chief Benefits Laurie Goodman, BGI (USA) • Novel publishing format – manuscript Editor publication and data hosting

Scott Edmunds, BGI (China) • Assignment of data DOIs allows separate data citation Assistant Editor

Alexandra Basford, BGI • The BGI is covering all APCs for the (China) first year after launch

www.gigasciencejournal.com

www.biomedcentral.com Open access, open peer review, and open data

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