BioMed Central was founded in 2000 as part of the Current Science Group (now Science Navigation Group, SNG), a nursery of scientific publishing companies. SNG chairman Vitek Tracz developed the concept for the company after NIH director Harold Varmus‘s PubMed Central concept for open-access publishing was scaled back.^[1] The first director of the company was Jan Velterop. Chemistry Central was established in 2006 and the PhysMath Central journal imprint in 2007.

In 2002, the company introduced article processing charges,^[2] and these have since been the primary source of revenue. In 2007, Yale University Libraries stopped subsidizing BioMed Central article processing charges for Yale researchers.^[3]

In October 2008, it was announced that BioMed Central (along with Chemistry Central and PhysMath Central) had been acquired by Springer Science+Business Media, the second largest STM publisher.^[4] The Chemistry Central and PhysMath Central brands have since been retired.

In November 2008, BioMed Central became an official supporting organisation of Healthcare Information For All.^[5]

Following the merger of BMC into Springer Nature, BMC journals were gradually converted to the general Springer Nature software. The software migration meant the loss of several features, often related to open science requirements, like the ability to download a machine-readable version of the paper (in XML format), direct download of PDF files and the ability to read articles without cookies.^[6]