History
BioMed Central was founded in 2000 as part of the Current Science Group (now Science Navigation Group, SNG), a nursery of scientific publishing companies. SNG chairman Vitek Tracz developed the concept for the company after NIH director Harold Varmus's PubMed Central concept for open-access publishing was scaled back. The first director of the company was Jan Velterop. In 2002, the company's business model evolved to include article processing charges, and these have since been the primary source of revenue.
Tracz's SNG also publishes The Scientist (a popular science magazine—the daily news section is free access; the remainder is by subscription), Faculty of 1000 (a subscription-only current awareness service highlighting recent biological and medical research), Global DataPoint, Telmap and People's Archive. Other companies that have been part of SNG in the past include Current Medicine Group, which publish medical books, journals, websites and the Images.MD medical image database (both acquired by Springer in 2005), Current Drugs (acquired by Thomson Reuters), and Current Biology and the Current Opinion journals (acquired by Elsevier).
In October 2008, it was announced that BioMed Central, Chemistry Central, and PhysMath Central had been acquired by Springer Science+Business Media, the second largest STM publister.
In 2007 Yale University Libraries stopped subsidizing page charges for affiliates of Yale who are using BioMed Central as the publisher of their works.
In November 2008, BioMed Central became an official supporting organisation of Healthcare Information For All by 2015, a global initiative committed to a future where people are no longer dying for lack of knowledge.
Read more about this topic: BioMed Central
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