BMC Medicine celebrates its 5th anniversary

In November 2008, BMC Medicine passed the landmark of its first 5 years of publishing. When we launched the journal with the aim of publishing high quality research of general interest and special importance, we had no idea what the future would bring. To mark the occasion of our 5th anniversary, we consider the achievements of the last 5 years and discuss our plans for the future. Editorial BMC Medicine, the flagship medical journal of the BMC series, recently celebrated its 5th anniversary. Over the last five years, the journal has developed substantially and has even been accepted for citation tracking by ISI within its first three years of publishing. As a result we are eagerly anticipating the journal's first official Impact Factor, due in June 2009. When BMC Medicine launched in November 2003, open access publishing was still a fairly novel concept. The last five years have seen open access evolve from what many considered to be a fringe movement to a widely accepted and sustainable business model for the publishing industry. This is particularly underlined by the recent acquisition of BioMed Central, the publisher of BMC Medicine, by Springer Science & Business Media, the world's second largest publisher of scientific, technical and medical journals. BMC Medicine aims to publish articles of outstanding quality, broad interest and special importance. In 2003 we had no idea of what the future would bring-we launched BMC Medicine with the highest of expectations and the support of an internationally renowned Editorial Board, but would medical researchers accept such an open access journal? Now, in celebration of our anniversary and in anticipation of our first official Impact Factor in June 2009, we reflect on the successes so far. As with all journals, the first measure of BMC Medicine's success is in the quality of its published articles. The systematic review of the incidence of schizophrenia, by John McGrath and colleagues [1], has been cited an amazing 92 times at the time of writing, and the second [2] and third [3] most cited articles have 52 and 40 citations respectively. BMC Medicine articles have been cited in such journals as The Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and BMJ, together with a whole range of other top tier general and subject-specific publications. Another measure of quality is circulation – as BMC Medicine is an open access journal without subscription barriers or print editions, we use article accesses in place of circulation numbers. Most original research articles published in BMC Medicine become highly accessed [4] soon after publication, and the number of accesses over time Published: 15 January 2009 BMC Medicine 2009, 7:3 doi:10.1186/1741-7015-7-3 Received: 14 January 2009 Accepted: 15 January 2009 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/7/3 © 2009 Appleford et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.