Biomed Central

An early open-access journal publisher, Biomed Central has been said to offer a cornucopia of "low quality" journals. According to one report (BioMed Central Accepts and Quickly Publishes an Obvious Junk Paper), "Biomed Central has published an obviously bogus scholarly article that apparently uses the 'template-plagiarism' technique, crafting a new article from an earlier one, changing the data and some of the text." Despite what seems to be flagrant plagiarism, the Biomed Central article remains on the web as 7/1/16.

In 2015, BMC Medicine published an article on the spam "associated with the rise of predatory journals (journals exploiting gold open access, providing no or non-sensible peer review, undercutting standard article processing charges, while frequently publishing rubbish)." The article examined the number of invitations to submit articles received "received by one of the authors (DM) over a 1-year period." David Moher & Anubhav Srivastava, You Are Invited to Submit … , BMC Med. 2015, 13:180, doi.org/10.1186/s12916-015-0423-3.

UPDATE (4/17/19): In 2008, the major publisher, Springer, acquired BMC, and the latter now is part of the Springer Nature Group. Springer praises BMC as "[a] pioneer of open access publishing" with "an evolving portfolio of high quality peer-reviewed journals." BMC claims to have "the highest standards of peer review." Nevertheless, in 2015 and 2016, large numbers of papers were retracted from BMC journals for plagiarism and "peer review and author manipulation."

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• 6/22/16, 7/1/16: Dear Prof Kaye, We are very pleased to announce that the open access journal Skeletal Muscle has received its first Impact Factor of 3.500. As you know, the Impact Factor is just one measure used for evaluating a journal. Should you be interested in more information on the Impact Factor in general and alternative metrics, please click here. Read these influential articles and submit your next manuscript to the journal. ... The Benefits of Publishing with Us • High quality peer-review service • Expert Editorial Board • Rapid publication upon acceptance • Widest possible global dissemination of your research • Inclusion in a number of relevant full-text repositories. Please forward this email and share the good news. Best wishes, The BioMed Central Team