Publications History

Since the beginning we realized that the work we were doing in the then emerging field of biomedical engineering was important and needed to be shared not just among the symposia participants but with the scientific community at large. Therefore, we started sharing all the work presented at the annual symposium in the form of journal articles in an annual publication.

Before we joined forces with the National Biomedical Sciences Instrumentation Symposium (NBSIS), the works presented at the first two annual gatherings (RMBS 1964 and RMBS 1965) were published by the Department of Electrical Engineering of the US Air Force Academy (DFEE-USAF), with the second issue (RMBS 1965) titled Bioengineering Today and Tomorrow. As the interest in biomedical engineering grew with the aerospace program of the 1960s, to ensure a wider distribution we partnered with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) who had already been sponsoring our first two symposia. IEEE become the distributor of the second issue (1965) and published and distributed the 3^rd and 4^th issues as IEEE Special Publications and of the 5^th and 6^th issues as IEEE Conference Records.

When we started to merge with NBSIS (which became the International Biomedical Sciences Instrumentation Symposium (IBSIS)), the Instrument Society of America (ISA), which was the IBSIS publisher with the Biomedical Sciences Instrumentation series, became our publisher as well. The works presented at the 1970 and 1972 joint IBSIS-RMBS symposia appeared in Biomedical Sciences Instrumentation volumes 7 and 9, and those presented in the RMBS 1971 and 1972 (which were held separately from NBSIS) appeared as proceedings of the Annual Rocky Mountain Bioengineering Symposium. In 1974, with the completion of the IBSIS-RMBS merger, we took over the organization of the symposia and each year's symposium program chairs became the editors of that year's volume of Biomedical Sciences Instrumentation. Volumes 10 (1974) through 53 (2017) were published by ISA who in the period 2006-2009 offered Biomedical Sciences Instrumentation both in printed and digital (CD) form and from 2010 onwards in digital form only (with the printed version available on demand).

Unfortunately, ISA had some identity issues, changing its focus (becoming in 2000 The Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation Society and then, in 2008, the International Society of Automation) and losing interest in acting as our publisher. This resulted in several problems with the publication of the journal. Therefore, in 2018 we found a new publisher, International Academic Express (IAE).

With the change in publisher came a change in the number of issues per year: given the increase in the number of papers we decided to go from one single issue a year to up to four issues per year (January, April, July and October). This also allows us to collect manuscripts throughout the year and yet still have the annual symposium where the authors can present their work and gain feedback from the attendees.

In late 2021, in order to modernize and greatly improve the journal processes from submission to review, publication and indexing, we launched our own digital platform based on the Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal Systems.

The long and tortuous history of our publications, summarized in the illustration below, is also reflected in the ISSN used over the years: