Interdisciplinary research and open access - a talk by Matt Cockerill at Berlin 10 Open Access meeting (Stellenbosch, South Africa, November 8th 2012)

1. Open Access and
interdisciplinary research
Matthew Cockerill
Managing Director, BioMed Central
10th Berlin Open Access Meeting
Stellenbosch, South Africa
Thursday 8th November 2012
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5

2. Open access helps eliminate barriers
between disciplines
 Under a subscription-based
model, institutions and departments often
only subscribe to essential journals for
the specific field
 Under open access, research benefits
from cross-fertilization with ideas from
other areas

3. Some examples of cross-fertilization…

4. By James Gathany (C
Public domain
,
1. Malaria

5. Fields contributing towards under-
standing and elimination of Malaria
• Parasitology
• Immunology
• Epidemiology
• Infectious diseases
• Clinical trials
• Health services research

7. Malaria Journal’s influence
 More than 400 articles published annually
 The field is now dominated by open
access journals
 Malaria Journal
 Parasites & Vectors
 PLoS One
 PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases
 Overall, 35% of malaria-related research
in PubMed is now immediate open access

8. By Sigurdas (Wikimedia commons) CC-BY-SA-
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/
,
2. Veterinary research

9. Veterinary research is badly
served by traditional model
 Traditional veterinary journals are
infrequently read/cited by non-vets
 High quality veterinary research has tended
to be published in “basic science” journals
 Veterinary medicine and human medical
research can benefit by sharing findings

10. Leading veterinary journals have
embraced open access

13. Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica
(Year of transfer: 2006)
1.6
1.367
1.4
1.196
1.2
Switched to open
access with 1.000
1 BioMed Central
Impact Factor
0.899
0.766
0.8 0.717
0.703
0.6 0.516
0.515
0.408 0.375
0.4 0.318
0.2
0
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011

14. By Robbie Dale (Flickr: Jess Ennis, Golden Girl) CC-BY-SA-2.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0
,
3. Sport science

16. Cross-journal collaboration

17. 4. Biofuels

18. Biofuels research
• Plant
science/genetics/genomics/agronomy
(Improving feedstock)
• Microbiology/Biotechnology
(Improving processing & fermentation)
• Biochemistry (Re-engineering
pathways)
• Economics (Land-use change)

20. 5. Flavour research

21. Research fields relating to Flavour
 Chemistry / Biochemistry
 Neuroscience / Psychology
 Genetics / Genomics
 Public Health / Nutrition
 Obesity
 Food science
 Citizen science (chefs and more…)

24. 6. Medical Case Reports

25. Cases DB
• Thousands of cases from all medical
disciplines
• Text-mining enables convenient filtering
by diagnosis, treatment, patient age etc
• Includes BioMed Central case reports
and OA case reports from other
publishers (available under CC license)

28. Open access and case reports
• Case reports are more useful when
aggregated into a coherent
database that spans medical
disciplines
• Breaks down barriers between
medical researchers, specialist
clinicians, GPs and patients

29. 7. Genome data

35. 8. Open Data

36. Data-sharing and data repositories
 Have taken off in certain areas
 Tend to be discipline-specific, e.g.
– Molecular sequence data (protein/dna)
– Protein and chemical structures
– Spectroscopy data
– Biodiversity data
– Public/government data
 Interoperability is limited

38. GigaScience
 Research involving “big data”
 Sharing datasets in reusable form
(e.g. the ISA-TAB standard)
 Using cloud-computing approaches to
allow computational analyses to be
easily reproduced and reused
 Part of wider „open data‟ efforts at
BioMed Central

41. Summary
 Research rarely falls clearly into discrete
disciplinary categories
 The pen access model facilitates cross-
fertilization between fields
 Discipline-specific journals need no
longer exist in isolation
 Interdisciplinary journals are now viable
and successful