During my short time as Editor-in-Chief of Biology Open (BiO), I’ve come to realise that publishing in the biomedical sciences is entering a period of profound change, the likes of which none of us has experienced before. The present system is under sustained attack and, although many scientists are probably unaware of this, there seems little chance that it will survive in its current form. In...

It is axiomatic that there has never been so much research productivity as in the present time. Not only are there more trained scientists alive and productive today than at any other point in history, but the last 25 years have also brought ever increasing gains in the speed and quantity of information delivery and in our ability to store scientific knowledge electronically. This is certainly ...

Discrimination and racism are deeply rooted in many aspects of the daily life activities societies. Academic medical publishing is not immune. There reports about pre-publication discrimination academic publishing. This may be practiced at different levels. It involve editorial leadership, members board unfair peer review. type reflected low number accepted publications coming from developing c...

Library-led publishing is one of the new approaches to journal publishing and open access that has grown tremendously in the last few years. A 2010 MLIS-funded survey found that 55% of respondents—from U.S. academic libraries of all different types and sizes—were already implementing or developing a publishing program. Library-led publishing has garnered such momentum because, by offering lowor...

In March 2011, as part of the background research to the FP7 Eurocancercoms project, the European Association for Cancer Research (EACR) conducted an online survey of its members working in Europe to discover their experiences of and attitudes to the issues surrounding academic publishing and Open Access. This paper presents the results from this survey and compares them to the results from a m...

Publishers of scholarly journals currently obtain most of their revenue from subscription fees charged to libraries and individual users. We call this the " reader-pays " pricing model. An alternative pricing method has recently emerged, in which publishers collect their revenue by charging significant publication fees to authors, and then supply their content over the internet, at no cost to r...

Tourism research has reached a mature stage indicated by the rising number of journals and citation patterns inside the tourism field. However, many challenges exist including the irrelevancy of tourism research to practitioners, increasing subscription cost of academic journals, the long delay in publishing research results, and academic institutions’ limited budget. Academic institutions are ...

Introduction As academia progresses towards the 21st century, increases in student numbers, distance learning, changes in copyright licensing and lack of funding means that academic institutions have to look more closely at the use of electronic resources in order to meet these challenges. The “wired campus” and “virtual university” mean more users looking for electronic resources and increased...

These Best Practice Guidelines on Publication Ethics describe Blackwell Publishing's position on the major ethical principles of academic publishing and review factors that may foster ethical behavior or create problems. The aims are to encourage discussion, to initiate changes where they are needed, and to provide practical guidance, in the form of Best Practice statements, to inform these cha...