BMC Biomedical Engineering: the BMC series expands into engineering!
I am delighted to announce that BMC Biomedical Engineering, a new open access, peer-reviewed journal is now open for submissions and with it the BMC series enters for the first time a new subject area: engineering. This is the first of two newly launched journals in the BMC series. Editor Harriet Manning discusses the launch of BMC Chemical Engineering in her blog post.
2018 has been declared as the “Year of Engineering” by the UK government, an initiative that has seen wide support by hundreds of national and international organisations. We see no better time to expand our offering to this diverse and crucial communit...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - June 12, 2018 Category: General Medicine Authors: Alexandros Houssein Tags: Medicine BMC Biomedical Engineering BMC Series Source Type: blogs
Increasing diversity in peer review with transparent mentoring of early career researchers
Peer review is central to the publishing process and has a fundamental role to play in maintaining the integrity of the published literature and advancing discovery. For the most part peer review works well with researchers wanting to improve not replace peer review. Indeed, in 2009, 91% of researchers surveyed as part of a Sense About Science survey felt peer review had improved their manuscript.
However, despite this, peer review can sometimes come under criticism. Research output is growing exponentially and this is putting pressure on the system, with many individuals inundated with requests to peer review. We therefo...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - June 11, 2018 Category: General Medicine Authors: Ella Flemyng Tags: Medical Evidence Open Access Publishing Journal of Medical Case Reports Pilot and Feasibility Studies Systematic Reviews Trials Source Type: blogs
How important are open access books to academic authors?
To kick off Academic Book Week in April, Springer Nature held a free event for researchers exploring open access (OA) books, discussing topics such as why academics publish OA books, how the impact of their research can be tracked, and the future of OA book funding. Researchers in the hard sciences are more familiar with the concept of open access article publishing, but we were interested in talking to researchers across various disciplines, including the Humanities and Social Sciences, specifically about OA books.
You can read what the event speakers had to say in our recent LSE Impact blog but we wanted to share with ...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - June 7, 2018 Category: General Medicine Authors: Christina Emery Tags: Open Access Publishing open access books Source Type: blogs
Turning social phenomena into data: measurement instruments for the social sciences (Part 2)
What social phenomena are the most difficult to grasp and describe quantitatively?
There can be no general answer to that question. Researchers interested in individual differences may say that getting to the bottom of individual personalities, or how they differ, is really challenging. Other researchers working on social groups may say that aggregate scores do not adequately present the reality of the dynamics in groups.
Researchers dealing with contextual phenomena at local, regional, or global levels may lament the fact that access to high quality data is difficult and the “right” level for aggregating data to descr...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - May 24, 2018 Category: General Medicine Authors: Roberto Garbero Tags: Health Open Access Publishing psychology Science:Social social sciences Source Type: blogs
Turning social phenomena into data: measurement instruments for the social sciences
What do we mean by “measurement instruments” in the social sciences?
Empirical social science is built on data, for example self-reports. This kind of data is assessed through measurement instruments that aim to reflect the reality, or the so-called “true score”. The better an instrument, the better the representation of reality. In order to get credible data and results in empirical social sciences, we need to rely on high-quality measures.
What are examples of social surveys for the general population?
There are numerous national and international comparative surveys, and they all aim to best represent their targ...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - May 17, 2018 Category: General Medicine Authors: Roberto Garbero Tags: Open Access Publishing psychology Science:Social Source Type: blogs
How does gender influence the academic publishing process?
How did you first become interested in gender diversity in the peer review process?
Dina: My interest began at the Fourth Global Symposium on Health Systems Research in 2016 where all talk was about a comment published by The Lancet highlighting how the Global Symposia have been dominated by authors from the Northern hemisphere who often conduct research on low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs). This was seen to undermine efforts to build capacity and drown the voices of national individuals and institutions in LMICs who work often with severely constrained resources.
Interestingly, the analysis revealed that men and wo...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - May 4, 2018 Category: General Medicine Authors: Dr Dina Balabanova & Jamie Lundine Tags: Publishing BMC Health Services Research Gender bias peer review Research Integrity and Peer Review Source Type: blogs
BMC series Publishing Workshops: East Coast US Tour
One of the strengths of the BMC series is our relationship with our Section Editors and our Associate Editors. They do a lot of hard work for our journals, overseeing peer review and making decisions on manuscripts. We love to meet our external editors in person, and even more so to support them and their research communities. Therefore, I was thrilled by two recent invitations from Associate Editors to speak to researchers and students at their institutions.
speaking at PopFamSheree Grate, Columbia University
On April 16, I spoke at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health as part of the Heilbrunn Dep...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - May 2, 2018 Category: General Medicine Authors: Tovah Honor Aronin Tags: Open Access Publishing BMC Series Workshop Source Type: blogs
Why I published an open access book
“Publishing is about communication beyond academia.”
– Prof. Owen Davies
Prof. Owen Davies has been interested in open access for more than ten years, having personally experimented with creating and uploading his own PDF online. There was interest in the article, but because it hadn’t been peer reviewed and published, he found academics were less willing or able to cite it. Since then he has published open access articles and in 2017, he and co-author Dr. Francesca Matteoni published Executing Magic in the Modern Era: Criminal Bodies and the Gallows in Popular Medicine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) as an...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - April 12, 2018 Category: General Medicine Authors: Christina Emery Tags: Open Access Publishing open access books Source Type: blogs
