[Insight-users] Wolfram Publicon Gives New Momentum to Open Access Publishing

[Luis Ibanez]

<http://www.wolfram.com/news/bmc.html>

<http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/ifora/publicon>

March 10, 2005--Wolfram Research and BioMed Central today announced a
partnership to streamline Open Access publishing. Using Wolfram
Research's new Wolfram *Publicon* software, authors gain the unique
advantage of being able to submit properly structured documents ready
for direct publication by BioMed Central, the leading Open Access publisher.

Open Access publishing provides free access to published material, while
authors pay a small fee to cover editing, review, and publishing.
Publicon gives editing and formatting tools directly to authors so that
submissions go through the online publishing process with minimum
intervention.

Publicon simplifies the process of writing and formatting technical
documents in XML, XHTML, and MathML. Built-in style sheets and the
user-friendly interface eliminate all the extra effort normally spent
readying a paper for publication. As a result, BioMed Central and other
publishers can rely on receiving properly formatted documents created in
Publicon. Such an effective system significantly reduces the time and
costs behind publishing important Open Access research

"Publicon was created primarily for electronic publishing and is ideal
for implementing the Open Access publishing model," said André
Kuzniarek, manager of document technology at Wolfram Research. "It helps
the STM publishing community simplify its publication processes, and our
partnership with BioMed Central signifies a serious step forward in
making it easy and affordable for authors to share their work with a
broad base of peers.

"Parts of the current publishing process are slower and more costly than
they should be because the formats that users normally submit in, like
Microsoft Word, do not have enough structure to allow reliable XML to be
extracted automatically--the information is simply presented too
ambiguously," said Matthew Cockerill, technical director at BioMed Central.

As part of this partnership, Publicon is being offered at a specially
discounted price. In addition, BioMed Central is giving a discount off
the article processing charge to authors who submit their work using
Publicon. For further details, see the BioMed Central website.

Publicon is available for Windows and Mac OS X. More information is
available.

BioMed Central, the Open Access publisher, is an independent online
publishing house committed to providing immediate access without charge
to the peer-reviewed biological and medical research it publishes. This
commitment is based on the view that open access to research is
essential to the rapid and efficient communication of science. In
addition to Open Access original research, BioMed Central also publishes
reviews and other subscription-based content.