BioMed Central is part of the Current Science Group [http://current-science-group.com]. Current Science Group is an independent, privately owned publishing group and has no connection with Elsevier Science. In 1997 several companies within the Current Science Group (Current Biology, BioMedNet and ChemWeb) were sold to Elsevier Science, this may account for any confusion about ownership.
BioMed Central believes that primary research should be available free to all, globally, and without any barriers to access. We believe the new technologies that are now available allow publishing of primary research to be done at very low cost and much more efficiently than before. BMC will develop technological and logistical methods to make the process of submitting, refereeing and publishing of primary research results on the web as efficient, fast and inexpensive as possible by making appropriate use of web technologies. This, combined with the avoidance of the costs associated with typesetting, printing, distribution and subscription collection make the process of publishing primary research results in BioMed Central very inexpensive. We will offer the service of publishing primary research free to authors. We plan to make our revenue by offering additional services on the BioMed Central site that will guide scientists to the most important information. This is an area where we believe that there is a real opportunity for publishers to add value. BioMed Central will provide intelligent and systematic commentary and reviews, news and alerting services, databases with strong editorial component, and e-commerce services. These services will charge a subscription or per usage fee. Some of these services may be free to academics, and will charge only to commercial users (as SwissProt [http://www.expasy.ch/sprot/sprot-top.html] does currently, for example). Our commercial success will depend on our ability to provide the services members of the community need and want at prices they are prepared to pay. In the future we may offer paid services to authors, when requested, such as copy editing manuscripts by authors with insufficient command of English, help with manuscript mark-up for web publication (when authors prefer not to do this themselves using utilities we will provide for that purpose) and others. Overall, BioMed Central plans to redefine the role of commercial scientific publishers by focusing on adding value, and offering services which complement the freely available original research literature of the future. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any further questions or would like to make any comments or suggestions. Mike Brown Customer Services Director http://www.biomedcentral.com http://current-science-group.com email - m...@biomedcentral.com Tel - +44 (0)20 7323 0323 Fax - +44 (0)20 7580 1938