• Top
• Editorial
• References

Editorial

The future of Biomedical Digital Libraries

Marcus A Banks and Wayne J Peay

Frederick L. Ehrman Medical Library, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA

Biomedical Digital Libraries 2006, 3:5doi:10.1186/1742-5581-3-5

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.bio-diglib.com/content/3/1/5

Received:	10 May 2006
Accepted:	13 June 2006
Published:	13 June 2006

© 2006 Marcus and Wayne; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Editorial

Our colleague Charles J. Greenberg founded Biomedical Digital Libraries (BDL) in 2004, with the support of an outstanding team of editors and advisors [1]. He envisioned the journal as a "legitimate alternative to traditional specialty journals in the field, which have subscription fees and assumption of copyright by the publisher" [2]. Charlie has now decided to pursue other worthy endeavors, and remains on our editorial board. As the new editors-in-chief of BDL, we share his belief in the power of open access and in the potential of this journal.

BDL has covered a broad terrain. We have published resource reviews and commentaries, and documented innovative uses of technology that further scientific discovery and inform collection development. Readers are welcome to peruse all articles published thus far [3]. One strength of BDL is the variety of article types, including hypotheses, which are, "short articles presenting an untested original hypothesis backed solely by previously published results rather than new evidence" Hypotheses "should outline significant progress in thinking that would also be testable" [4]. We hope to publish the first hypothesis in BDL soon.

Print-only articles are not the only form of scholarly communication in the online era. BDL stands ready to publish multimedia works, including podcasts. Ramsey's "Multimedia Bootcamp" paper is the first BDL piece to feature movies [5], and we expect that many more will follow.

Regardless of the presentation format, our dedicated team of peer reviewers will critique submissions fairly and rigorously. After a healthy internal discussion BDL recently adopted an open peer review process, in which the authors and reviewers are all known to each other. Despite legitimate concerns that non-anonymity will cause reviewers to be less candid, we believe that transparency will lead to more thorough reviews overall. BioMed Central, BDL's publisher, has endorsed the concept of open peer review as well [6].

New presentation formats, new reviewing protocols - All of this causes us to think we are looking at a new type of journal. In an era of rapidly disseminated pre-print articles and frequently cited web log postings, the concept of the formal journal must evolve in order to remain vibrant. We believe that BDL is up to this challenge, and cordially invite the insights of our editors, advisors, authors and readers as we begin the journey.

References

1. Biomedical Digital Libraries Editorial Board [http://bio-diglib.com/edboard/] webcite

   

   Accessed 28 April, 2006.

2. Greenberg CL: True good. [http://bio-diglib.com/content/1/1/1] webcite

   Biomedical Digital Libraries 2004., 1(1):

   Accessed 28 April, 2006.

3. Biomedical Digital Libraries: Browse Articles [http://bio-diglib.com/articles/browse.asp] webcite

   

   Accessed 28 April, 2006.

4. About Biomedical Digital Libraries [http://bio-diglib.com/info/about/] webcite

   

   Accessed 28 April, 2006.

5. Ramsey EC: Multimedia Bootcamp: a health sciences library provides basic training to promote faculty technology integration. [http://bio-diglib.com/content/3/1/3/] webcite

   Biomedical Digital Libraries 2006., 3(3):

   Accessed 28 April, 2006.

6. Godlee F: Making reviewers visible: Openness, accountability, and credit. [http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/287/21/2762] webcite

   Journal of the American Medical Association 2002, 287(21):2762-2765. PubMed Abstract | Publisher Full Text

   Accessed 28 April, 2006.