Open access (OA) publisher BioMed Central has announced that, as the official sponsor of Open Access Week 2012, it is participating in various activities around the globe for the event. Open Access Week, organised by SPARC, is now entering its sixth year. It is projected as a global opportunity for the academic and research community to enhance their knowledge of the benefits of OA, to share what they've learned with colleagues, and to inspire wider participation in making OA the norm in scholarship and research.
BioMed's OA journal BMC Medicine has published a research that reports the growing volume of scientific articles published in full immediate OA journals during the period 2000-2011. Mikael Laakso and Bo-Christer Björk from Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, found that OA journal publishing is disrupting the dominant subscription-based model of scientific publishing, and the annual share of published journal articles published in immediate OA journals has grown rapidly during the last decade.
BioMed Central went mobile last week in a move that seeks to promote OA to scientific research on the move. All BioMed journal websites now offer users on mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablet computers, an enhanced experience when viewing full text articles, making better use of small screen sizes and touch-screen functionality. Using a 'responsive' web design, article pages now automatically respond to the capabilities of the device that is being used, providing a mobile-optimized appearance.
