Wolfram Publicon Gives New Momentum to Open Access Publishing

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.