BioMed Central (BMC) is one of the world's largest open-access publishers, producing over 300 peer-reviewed journals spanning biomedicine, biology, public health, bioinformatics, and clinical medicine. Every article in every BMC journal is freely available as a PDF under Creative Commons CC BY — no paywall, no login, no cost.
BMC PDFs use standard two-column academic journal layout, which renders poorly on e-reader screens. Converting to EPUB gives you a clean single-column reflowable document that you can read on a Kindle or Kobo with adjustable font, night mode, and offline access — perfect for reading during commutes or when away from a desktop screen.
| Journal | Field | Impact | PDF cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Genome Biology | Genomics & functional genomics | Very high | Free, CC BY |
| BMC Medicine | Clinical medicine (all) | Very high | Free, CC BY |
| BMC Biology | General biology | High | Free, CC BY |
| BMC Bioinformatics | Computational biology | High | Free, CC BY |
| BMC Genomics | Genomics & transcriptomics | High | Free, CC BY |
| BMC Public Health | Public health & epidemiology | High | Free, CC BY |
| BMC Cancer | Oncology | High | Free, CC BY |
| BMC Infectious Diseases | Infectious disease | High | Free, CC BY |
| BMC Neuroscience | Neuroscience | Medium-high | Free, CC BY |
| BMC Health Services Research | Health systems & policy | Medium-high | Free, CC BY |
10.1186 — paste the DOI at https://doi.org/10.1186/XXXXX to go directly to the article page.Tip: BMC articles are indexed in PubMed, Europe PMC, Google Scholar, OpenAlex, and Semantic Scholar — all link to the free BMC full text.
| Publisher | No. journals | Key flagship | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|
| BioMed Central (Springer Nature) | 300+ | Genome Biology, BMC Medicine | CC BY |
| PLOS | 10 | PLOS ONE, PLOS Biology | CC BY |
| eLife | 1 | eLife | CC BY |
| Frontiers | 200+ | Frontiers in Neuroscience | CC BY |
| PeerJ | ~30 | PeerJ, PeerJ Computer Science | CC BY |
| Hindawi (Wiley) | 200+ | Disease Markers, Complexity | CC BY |
Yes. BioMed Central is a fully open-access publisher — every article in every BMC journal is published under Creative Commons CC BY licence, which means the PDF is freely available to anyone without paywall or institutional login. Go to the article page on biomedcentral.com and click the PDF button.
BioMed Central publishes over 300 peer-reviewed open-access journals spanning biomedicine, biology, public health, and related fields. The most widely read include BMC Medicine, BMC Biology, BMC Bioinformatics, BMC Genomics, BMC Cancer, BMC Public Health, BMC Infectious Diseases, and Genome Biology (flagship high-impact journal).
Springer Nature acquired BioMed Central in 2008 and now owns it. BMC journals continue to operate as an open-access brand within Springer Nature's portfolio. Springer Nature also publishes subscription journals and hybrid journals (where some articles are open access). The BMC-branded journals are always fully open access; Springer journals vary.
BMC's HTML article view is good for quick desktop reading, but it is not optimised for offline e-reader use. Converting the PDF to EPUB gives you a single-column reflowable file you can read offline on a Kindle or Kobo with adjustable font size, night mode, and device-level annotations — particularly useful for reading during commutes or when away from a screen.
Yes. Download each BMC article PDF individually and convert each one to EPUB via toolkit.bot. Name your EPUBs consistently (Author Year - Title.epub) and add them to an e-reader collection. For reference management, consider using Zotero to organise the PDFs and track which articles you have converted and read.
Related: PLOS to EPUB · eLife to EPUB · PubMed to EPUB · PDF to EPUB for researchers