Press Release: 22 August 2006
Chemistry Central, launched today at www.chemistrycentral.com, is a new open access website for chemists. It brings together peer-reviewed research in chemistry from a range of open access journals. All the original research articles on Chemistry Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication.
Chemistry Central has been developed by the same team who created BioMed Central, the leading biomedical open access publisher.
Bryan Vickery, Deputy Publisher at BioMed Central and a chemist by training, says “We have seen increasing interest from chemists in the open access publishing model and, having launched two chemistry-specific titles in the last 18 months, the time seemed right for BioMed Central to create an open access publishing website to meet the needs of chemists.”
Chemistry Central features open access articles from Geochemical Transactions, the online journal of the American Chemical Society’s Division of Geochemistry, and from the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry, which is published by the Beilstein Institut in association with BioMed Central. Chemistry Central also features chemistry-related articles publshed in BioMed Central’s biological and medical journals, including BMC Pharmacology, BMC Biochemistry and BMC Chemical Biology.
Journals featured on Chemistry Central incorporate special features to make them suitable for chemistry-related content. For example, authors can submit their figures as ChemDraw or ISISDraw files, and see an instant thumbnail preview showing how the web version of the figure will appear. Articles published in the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry also incorporate a graphical abstract on the table of contents and search results pages, providing a quick visual summary the research reported in the article.
As well as viewing the latest research highlights and content from featured journals, users of Chemistry Central can discuss articles, submit manuscripts, sign up for email alerts and find out more about starting a new open access chemistry journal or transferring an existing title to the Chemistry Central open access model.
Today’s launch of Chemistry Central is just a preview of what is to come. Further open access chemistry journals will be launched in the near future, including Chemistry Central Journal, which will cover all areas of chemistry, broken down into discipline-specific sections. Chemists who wish to support open access to published research by playing an editorial role on this major new journal should contact editorial@chemistrycentral.com.
Chemistry Central is part of the Open Access Central
family of sites, announced today by Science Navigation Group (press release available at http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/pr-releases?pr=20060822b).
Press contacts:
Grace Baynes for Chemistry Central
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7631 9988
Email: press@chemistrycentral.com
More on OA Central and Chemistry Central
Kim Thomas, BioMed Central opens access to Chemistry articles , Information World Review, August 22, 2006.
Excerpt:
Open access publisher BioMed Central has launched Chemistry Central, a site that the London based company hopes will see chemistry become as prolific in the open access arena as physics.
Access to Chemistry Central, and its sister site BioMed Central is available through a newly-launched portal, Open Access Central, which will provide a single point of access to all the publisher’s open access journals. A new site, PhysMath Central, is also planned for physics and mathematics.
“There are plenty of opportunities for physicists to publish their findings using the open access model,” said BioMed publisher Matthew Cockerill, but chemistry had lagged behind. He hopes the launch of Chemistry Central will change that: “We want open access to spread to as wide an audience as possible.”
Chemistry Central will make it possible for researchers both to publish articles in existing journals and to set up their own journals….
Cockerill said that the future of scientific publishing lay in open access: “Publishers need to adapt to the reality of what the web means for publishing scientific findings. In 2000 BioMed Central was a very new model. It had a slow start but we’ve had increasing enthusiasm as scientists started to see the benefits. We’ve seen a doubling every 18 months of the number of articles submitted to our journals.”
