Chemistry Central, launched today at www.chemistrycentral.com, is a new open access website for chemists. It brings together peer-reviewed research in chemistry from a range of open access journals. All the original research articles on Chemistry Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication.
Chemistry Central has been developed by the same team who created BioMed Central, the leading biomedical open access publisher.
Bryan Vickery, Deputy Publisher at BioMed Central and a chemist by training, says "We have seen increasing interest from chemists in the open access publishing model and, having launched two chemistry-specific titles in the last 18 months, the time seemed right for BioMed Central to create an open access publishing website to meet the needs of chemists."
Chemistry Central features open access articles from Geochemical Transactions, the online journal of the American Chemical Society's Division of Geochemistry, and from the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry, which is published by the Beilstein Institut in association with BioMed Central. Chemistry Central also features chemistry-related articles published in BioMed Central's biological and medical journals, including BMC Pharmacology, BMC Biochemistry and BMC Chemical Biology.
Journals featured on Chemistry Central incorporate special features to make them suitable for chemistry-related content. For example, authors can submit their figures as ChemDraw or ISISDraw files, and see an instant thumbnail preview showing how the web version of the figure will appear. Articles published in the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry also incorporate a graphical abstract on the table of contents and search results pages, providing a quick visual summary the research reported in the article.
As well as viewing the latest research highlights and content from featured journals, users of Chemistry Central can discuss articles, submit manuscripts, sign up for email alerts and find out more about starting a new open access chemistry journal or transferring an existing title to the Chemistry Central open access model.
Today's launch of Chemistry Central is just a preview of what is to come. Further open access chemistry journals will be launched in the near future, including Chemistry Central Journal, which will cover all areas of chemistry, broken down into discipline-specific sections. Chemists who wish to support open access to published research by playing an editorial role on this major new journal should contact editorial@chemistrycentral.com
