Thank you for your query. With the exception of a small number of our journals (notably Cell Press titles and The Lancet), our policy is not to consider preprint posting as prior publication that would disqualify an article's consideration by a journal. We do not have a formal policy on wikis or blogs, nor have questions been previously raised by anyone. We would expect to follow our general approach of “watch, test and learn”, with no predisposition to establish a policy prior to gaining more experience and gathering more examples.

Thanks very much to Helen Gainford at Elsevier for this email.

Every peer-reviewed research article appearing in any journal published by BioMed Central is 'open access', meaning that:

1. The article is universally and freely accessible via the Internet, in an easily readable format and deposited immediately upon publication, without embargo, in an agreed format - current preference is XML with a declared DTD - in at least one widely and internationally recognized open access repository (such as PubMed Central).

2. The author(s) or copyright owner(s) irrevocably grant(s) to any third party, in advance and in perpetuity, the right to use, reproduce or disseminate the research article in its entirety or in part, in any format or medium, provided that no substantive errors are introduced in the process, proper attribution of authorship and correct citation details are given, and that the bibliographic details are not changed. If the article is reproduced or disseminated in part, this must be clearly and unequivocally indicated.

BioMed Central is committed permanently to maintaining this open access publishing policy, retrospectively and prospectively, in all eventualities, including any future changes in ownership.

For a more information please read our open access charter at http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/charter

Does BMC's open access policy include accepting papers where researchers have previously published preliminary versions of the results and figures on personal websites?

Journals in the BMC series publish only 'original research' articles.

For a breakdown of accepted article types please go to the URL below and select a journal from the drop-down list and click on the 'Instructions for authors' link.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/submit

Thanks very much to Ben Weston at BMC for this information

Since we aim to publish original research BioMed Central journals do not generally accept work that has been previously formally published in a peer-reviewed journal.

There is some editorial discretion in this - for example, we will consider publishing research articles which were previously published in a language other than English, subject to having permission from the copyright owner, and subject to the English version of the article making it through BioMed Central's own peer review process.

Circulating preprints (in print or electronically) is not treated by BioMed Central as formal publication, and it is acceptable for a researcher to present data and figures on a their own website in 'open notebook' form, as this is really just another case of preprint-like informal circulation. Similarly, presenting figures and data in oral or poster presentations at conferences is not a block to subsequent publication with BioMed Central, though it is good practice mention such previous presentation in the acknowledgements. However, if the conference presentation has subsequently been published in full as part of a peer-reviewed set of conference proceedings, we do consider that 'formal publication' and would not generally consider such an article for publication, unless the work reported goes significantly beyond that which appeared in the conference proceedings.

Thanks very much to Matt Hodgkinson at BMC for following this up

Thank you for your email, and apologies for the slight delay in my response (I have been on holiday). The Nature journals share the same policy on this subject, which is outlined here

www.nature.com/authors/editorial_policies/availability.html

This web page carries links to varoius editorials explaining details of the policies in Nature journals, all of which are freely available.

As you can see from the web page, our principle is to support and encourage researchers in sharing and discussing data before submission to one of our journals, whether that be via a preprint server, a site such as Nature Precedings, a conference presentation or abstract, a blog or a wiki. What we do not allow is discussion of work with the media before submission or before publication. If a journalist becomes aware of scientific work via a conference presentation or an internet site, we advise the author to explain to the journalist that the work will be submitted to a journal, and cannot be discussed further until the peer-review process is complete. Our policies about communication with the media are explained here http://www.nature.com/authors/editorial_policies/embargo.html.

You are welcome to include this reply (or part of it) in your guide, and to copy any text from the web pages above, so long as you provide the URL and attribution (to Nature Publishing Group or Nature journals). I’d be interested in reading the final version if you let me know when it is complete: we can probably include a link to it from the “availability” page above.

Thanks very much to Maxine Clarke at Nature for this

We've had a couple of inquiries about this recently, so I'm going to introduce a clearer policy on this. Currently, all we have in our policy guide is the following

6. Prior Publication

When submitting an article, all authors are asked to indicate that they have not submitted a similar manuscript for publication elsewhere. If related work has been submitted elsewhere, then a copy must be included with the article submitted to PLoS. Reviewers will be asked to comment on the overlap between related submissions.

So, I'll plan to expand this and get back to you when we've nailed the text. We'll need to run this by our external Editors-in-Chief as well, so it'll be a couple of weeks.

Thanks very much to Mark Patterson at PLoS for this