BioMed Central (
BMC) is a
UK-based for-profit scientific publisher specializing in
open access publication. BMC publishes 202
scientific journals, and describes itself as the first and largest open access science publisher. BMC sister companies publish the
Chemistry Central and
PhysMath Central journals. The Managing Director is Matt Cockerill.
Most titles are
open access, including its flagship journals
Journal of Biology,
Malaria Journal, the innovative
and the
BMC journal series including the leading titles
BMC Biology and
BMC Medicine. Others are open access for the research articles portion only, such as
,
,
, and
. Some review titles (offered on the BioMed Central website, but published by Thomson Reuters), such as
Current Opinion in Drug Discovery & Development are entirely subscription based. Open access content is released under the
Creative Commons "Attribution" license which grants permission to reuse publications and produce derivative work.
In October 2008, it was announced that BMC,
Chemistry Central, and
PhysMath Central, had been acquired by
Springer Science+Business Media. Previously, since its creation, the company was part of
Science Navigation Group, chaired by Vitek Tracz, which also owns
The Scientist (a popular science magazine—the daily news section is free access; the remainder is by subscription),
Faculty of 1000 (a subscription-only current awareness service highlighting recent biological research),
Global DataPoint,
Telmap and
People's Archive.
Another set of Science Navigation Group companies,
Current Medicine Group, which publish medical books, journals, websites and the
Images.MD medical image database, was acquired by Springer in 2005.
In November 2008, BMC became an official supporting organisation of
HIFA2015 (Healthcare Information For All by 2015).
See also
