Can I just say I love Biomed Central #OpenAccess

Well, I have given Biomed Central a bit of snarky grief the last few days over a few things. First, I posted about to my Posterous site (but not here) a little comment about how their web site looks weird in safari:

Then I posted to this blog a little ditty about how I did not like some parts of a phylogenetic tree they use in marketing:No award to give out but here are some lessons in using Google's image search to find an image source

My main complaint was the poor treatment of microbes in the tree. In that post I discussed how I used google image search to trace the tree

 to a few sites and discovered that they recognized it was a bit of a biased tree.  And I noted they had fridge magnets that had the tree and how I wanted one.



And, well, they have responded brilliantly.

Matthew Cockerill posted to my posterous site about how he was looking into the Safari issue and then, they fixed it (it was a font display issue).

And then today in the mail I received a gift and a note

The note reads ""We'll do justice to the microbial world one day".

Indeed.

I note, even without their responses, I truly love Biomed Central.  I published my first open access paper was published in a Biomed Central Journal, Genome Biology: http://genomebiology.com/2000/1/6/research/0011 and I have published quite a few articles in their journals including:

• Introducing W.A.T.E.R.S.: a Workflow for the Alignment, Taxonomy, and Ecology of Ribosomal Sequences
• Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans metabolism: from genome sequence to industrial applications
• Refined annotation and assembly of the Tetrahymena thermophila genome sequence through EST analysis, comparative genomic hybridization, and targeted gap closure
• A genomic analysis of the archaeal system Ignicoccus hospitalis-Nanoarchaeum equitans
• A simple, fast, and accurate method of phylogenomic inference
• New evolutionary frontiers from unusual virus genomes

Biomed Central was THE pioneer for truly open access publications in biology and they are still doing great things.  I note in addition, they do a very good job covering microbiology not only in their general journals but also with specific microbiology focused journals including:

• Annals of Clinical Microbiology and Antimicrobials
• Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control
• BMC Infectious Diseases
• BMC Microbiology
• Gut Pathogens
• Microbial Cell Factories
• Microbial Informatics and Experimentation
• Virology Journal

So it seems - you are already doing some justice to the microbial world.