News release - Shining Light on science's "dark data": New venture

[<Charlotte.Webber@biomedcentral.com>]

News release from BioMed Central
26 February 2008

Shining Light on science's "dark data": New venture ensures a 
fuller scientific record

Not all scientific research leads to groundbreaking conclusions. 
Valuable research data all over the world is hidden away in lab 
drawers, unexposed to the light of day, and unused by the 
scientific community. This body of idle knowledge, or "dark 
data", is now being set free with the launch of BioMed Central's 
BMC Research Notes.

BMC Research Notes, a new open access journal, is publishing 
scientifically sound research across all fields of biology and 
medicine. This enables researchers to publish updates to previous 
research, software tools and databases, data sets, small-scale 
clinical studies, and reports of confirmatory or 'negative' 
results. The liberating of "dark data" ensures that this 
important information is published in standard, reusable formats 
and is fully searchable and easily harvested for reuse by the 
scientific community.

Exposing these "dark data" to the light will prove hugely 
significant for encouraging future advances, and will lead to an 
increased level of data sharing within the scientific community.

Commenting on the launch of BMC Research Notes, Prof Christophe 
Ampe of the University of Ghent stated "I strongly support the 
idea of having this type of informative journal for data 
otherwise lost for the scientific community. In my view the 
recent trend not to publish negative results may affect the 
progression of science in the long term. I often wonder how many 
times negative experiments are duplicated by different research 
groups?"

BMC Research Notes will provide a home for short publications, 
case studies, incremental updates to previous work, results of 
individual experiments and similar materials that currently lack 
a credible outlet.

In a similar manner to BioMed Central's other innovative journals 
(such as Biology Direct and the Journal of Medical Case Reports), 
BMC Research Notes will make vast deposits of data publicly and 
freely accessible for researchers and general public alike.

Prof Tina Jaskoll from the University of Southern California 
heralded the establishment of BMC Research Notes stating "This 
new journal is long overdue and I applaud BioMed Central for 
launching it".

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For more information, please contact:
Matt McKay
Head of PR, BioMed Central
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7079 4845
Email: matthew.mckay@biomedcentral.com