Researchers have to stay current in their subject matter and they have to establish themselves as leaders in a field. We propose “bims: Biomed News” as a tool to help to achieve both aims at the same time. Bims is an expertise sharing system based on PubMed. Bims users curate reports on new additions on the topic of their expertise. This is done weekly and does not take too much time. Users teach a sophisticated machine learning system on what papers they want to see. They update the learning model every week by selecting new papers. Bims provides a service to both the topic expert and the interest audience. The topic expert can keep up with PubMed abstracts in a manageable format while also gaining exposure to the community through their contribution. The audience receives a curated list from the topic expert that is free to receive. Hopefully Biomed News will be a service with hundreds of topic experts around the world providing their curated selections of abstracts from peer reviewed journals and preprints to the global scientific community. See http://biomed.news

Openness is an absolute requirement for the success of Biomed News. We must distribute Biomed News reports widely without restriction. The more pairs of eyes that see the report issues, the more our users will be seen as subject experts, and the more they will be motivated to do a good and timely job producing the report issues. More generally, with the ever expanding availability of knowledge the access to knowledge should be available to all that could use it. This knowledge should be readily available, especially in places where resources are limited. By providing an open service Biomed News will provide interested parties with an update of recommended relevant abstracts that will save on time and costs.

Bims was created by Thomas Krichel. He assures me he will continue to maintain the project even in the absence of external subsidies. He uses the software he has been using for NEP: New Economics Papers at http://nep.repec.org and and the server that is used for that project, while we hope to get a dedicated server soon. Biomed News has recruited several volunteers to test out the system who act as testers of the service so that we can gather feedback on usability. My employer prides itself to be the “Connected University”. They are suportive of my role to increase scientific knowledge and to share this with the scientific and general community. These have been my goals as an academic scientist since I started 20 years ago. Biomed News is an important part of this as it shares knowledge with the wider community. In my position as Associate Professor I am allocated dedicated time for scholarly activities to dedicate to research and knowledge transfer. I am beginning collaborations with colleagues at Staffordshire University in the School of Computing and Digital Technology.

Throughout my 20 year career in academia I have always been enthusiastic about acquiring new knowledge and practice. This has been from a variety of encounters and experiences with fellow researchers and lecturers as well as members of the general public. I have been fortunate to be able to work at different universities and research institutes in the UK, USA and most recently Brazil. These opportunities have enabled me to interact with academics from all over the world and to learn about their professional expertise along with customs and cultures that are incorporated into my work and general outlook. I feel that from the people I have worked with up until now I have been able to acquire an understanding of the global nature of academia and collaborative work. This is something I feel is important to share with others I work with by including in my teaching and interactions with colleagues and the general public. As part of my contribution to increasing the public appreciation of science I worked with an artist, Yuko Oda, to present a lecture on the art and science of nature in 2017. Also, I have learned much from my time working with Thomas Krichel, we come from very different fields but share a common interest in making knowledge available. I have learned aspects of programming and information systems as we work together on a common goal.

Thomas Krichel was an eLife Sprint participant in 2019.