Open access publisher BioMed Central has announced the winner of the 7th Annual Research Awards. The awards honour the very best research published in one of BioMed Central's 250 plus open access journals in 2012.
The winners of the BioMed Central Research Award, supported by antibodies-online.com, were selected from a shortlist consisting of the winners of the ten subject categories. Geoffrey S Diemer and Kenneth M Stedman, from Portland State University, won the award for their article A novel virus genome discovered in an extreme environment suggests recombination between unrelated groups of RNA and DNA viruses, which was published in Biology Direct. The article won accolades not only for the method used to uncover the virus, but for its biological insights into the novel viral genome.
The awards were commemorated as part of an evening celebrating BioMed Central and open access, including the tenth anniversary of the initial publication of BMC Biology, the flagship biology journal of BioMed Central, and the launch of the new medical and biology online magazine Biome. The evening also included a panel discussion on the hotly-debated topic of how to avoid the 'tyranny' of current peer review practices, which was fitting since Biology Direct, which published the award-winning article, has pioneered a novel form of peer review.
The winners were selected by a panel of top scientists and clinicians picked from the editorial boards of BioMed Central's portfolio of over 250 journals, which has published over 150,000 peer-reviewed open access articles to date.
