BMC Biology (ISSN 1741-7007) is an online journal publishing research articles after full peer review. All articles are published, without barriers to access, immediately upon acceptance. The journal is published by BioMed Central Ltd, Floor 6, 236 Gray's Inn Road, London, WC1X 8HL, United Kingdom.

Scope

BMC Biology - the flagship biology journal of the BMC series - publishes research and methodology articles of special importance and broad interest in any area of biology and biomedical sciences. The fields covered include biochemistry, cell biology, chemical biology, computational biology, developmental biology, ecology, evolutionary biology, genetics, genomics, immunology, microbiology, molecular biology, neurobiology, pharmacology, physiology, plant biology, structural biology and systems biology.

Criteria for publication

To be appropriate for BMC Biology, articles need to be of special importance and broad interest. This will be determined by in-house editorial assessment, peer review and by the advice of a member of the Editorial Board. There are no restrictions on the length of an article, but authors should bear in mind that excessive length deters potential readers.

Articles that are sound research but only of importance to those with very closely related interests will not be considered for publication, but should this only become apparent after peer review, the authors may be offered publication in one of the subject-specific BMC journals (such as BMC Cell Biology).

Portability of peer review

BMC Biology is affiliated with other biology journals published by BioMed Central such as Journal of Biology and journals in the BMC series. If referees judge that a manuscript is sound but not of special interest and therefore not appropriate for BMC Biology the referee reports can be shared with other journals in the BMC series.

Transferring a manuscript from one journal to another will not incur delays as the same in-house Editor will manage the peer review process. Conversely, if a manuscript submitted to BMC Biology is judged to be of exceptional interest by the referees and editors, we may offer publication in Journal of Biology.

Speed of publication

BMC Biology offers a very fast publication schedule while maintaining rigorous peer review; all articles must be submitted online, and peer review is managed fully electronically (articles are distributed in PDF form, which is automatically generated from the submitted files). Articles will be published electronically in manuscript form immediately upon acceptance. A fully structured web version, and accompanying laid out PDF, will be published within a few weeks of acceptance.

Flexibility

As an electronic-only journal, BMC Biology gives authors the opportunity to publish large data sets, large numbers of illustrations and moving pictures, to display data in a form that can be read directly by other software packages so as to allow readers to manipulate the data for themselves, and to create all relevant links (for example, to PubMed, to sequence and other databases, and to other papers).

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts must be submitted to BMC Biology electronically using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

Indexing and archiving

Following publication in BMC Biology, the full text of each article is immediately and permanently archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also in repositories at the University of Potsdam in Germany, at INIST in France and in e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands' digital archive of all electronic publications. BMC Biology is indexed/tracked/covered by PubMed, MEDLINE, BIOSIS, CAS, Scopus, EMBASE, Zoological Record and Google Scholar.

BMC Biology is included in Thomson Reuters Web of Science and other products. It has an Impact Factor of 5.06.

Copyright

The authors are the copyright holders for all articles in BMC Biology and have granted to any third party, in advance and in perpetuity, the right to use, reproduce or disseminate the article, according to the BioMed Central copyright and license rules.

Citing papers in the journal

Articles in BMC Biology should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal, with one exception. Because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number.

The following citation:

BMC Biol 2000, 1:2

refers to article 2 from volume 1 of the journal.

As an online journal, BMC Biology does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

Contacting BMC Biology

Queries about content, submissions, or the review process should be directed to editorial@biomedcentral.com. All other enquiries should be directed to info@biomedcentral.com.