Hyderabad has always been the hub for healthcare and pharmaceuticals. The city has given many entrepreneurs from these sectors. The city-based serial entrepreneur Dr Srinubabu Gedela has chosen a rare path that connects these sectors, that of open-access scientific journals and health/medical informatics.
His venture Omics International, the world’s leading open-access journal with an estimated 50 million users is still growing. His company owns 1,000 open-access journal titles and posts 50,000 articles every year in medicine, technology and engineering, with support from 50,000 qualified scientists as editorial board members. Going beyond journals, he created a conference division that has organised 3,000 events in 40 countries, worldwide.
He always had a connection with science. He did his M Tech with specialisation in Biotechnology in 2006 and was awarded Ph D for his work on early stage identification of diabetes in 2008. While pursuing his Doctorate at the Andhra University, he received Young Scientist Award in 2007 from South Korea for his application of mathematical modelling for life sciences under sponsorship from Human Proteome Organisation (HUPO).
During the award ceremony, he expressed his problems of literature access. He debated that scholars from developing countries are not able to access literature and there was a need for open-access journal.
This is where the entrepreneurial bug bit him. He made a beginning with support he received from several scholars with the launch of first open-access journal called Journal of Proteomics & Bioinformatics in 2008. He also bought a domain name for Rs 200 and made a website and began building his company named as Omics Online Publishing (now Omics International) catering to information in the fields of biology studies.
