The crisis in scholarly publishing, which has hit the Science and Technology fields especially hard, remains to be an important issue for researchers, teaching faculty, students, and librarians alike. However, BioMed Central is trying to change that.

BioMed Central is a collection of peer-reviewed, open-access electronic journals. It boasts over 80 journals in the areas of Biochemistry, Bioinformatics, Cell Biology, Genetics, Genomics, Immunology, Molecular Biology, Microbiology and Physiology to name a few.

BioMed Central is committed to providing free access to research articles from its journals and its content is permanently archived in PubMed Central. All research articles are freely available to the public, while value-added content in some of its journals (such as review articles, commentary articles, web reports, image databases and evaluation services) require a subscription.

While BioMed Central is not a 'database' per se, it does offer a search engine which enables you to search for topics across all BMC journals. Many BMC journals are also indexed in Medline, Web of Science, CAS, CABI and BIOSIS.

More Information:

BioMed Central Power Point

Open Access News- An informative and very active blog tracking news on Open Access and Scholarly Publishing.

Peer-Reviewed- Refers to articles that have been approved by experts in the field, outside of the editorial board.

Open Access- Journals that make content freely available, or for a reasonable cost. Open Access can also refer to the 'movement' which is attempting to move away from high-cost, commercial publishing toward low-cost or free publishing.

Database- Usually refers to an electronic version of what were previously referred to in print as indexes & abstracts. An index (or database) compiles article citations from pertinent journals from many different publishers.

This is significantly different from a publisher's searchable journal collection like Science Direct, IEEE Xplore, and BioMed Central which only contain their own publications.

By using a 'true' bibliographic database like, BIOSIS, Medline, Web of Science, or SciFinder Scholar your search will retrieve articles from many more journals/publishers and thus will be more comprehensive and complete.

If you would like additional information about BioMed Central or any of the Libraries' other databases, please direct your questions to   .

Donna Braquet, Life Sciences Librarian
15 April 2004

To read about previously featured databases, please refer to the Featured Databases Archive.