About Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration

What is Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration?

Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration is an Open Access, peer-reviewed online journal that will encompass all aspects of scientific information management and studies of scientific practice, with a particular emphasis on biomedical laboratory investigations.

Currently, many scattered disciplines study aspects of scientific practice, including informatics, computer science, sociology, cognitive psychology, scientometrics, rhetoric, and history and philosophy of science. The journal will connect these disparate perspectives with each other, and with contemporary scientific practice.

Content overview

Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration considers the following types of articles:

• Research articles - include scholarly studies of scientific practice, information needs, tool development, scientific rhetoric, bibliometrics, data representation methods, and so forth. Researchers are also encouraged to submit 'discovery notes', which describe literature-based discovery or data mining findings that follow systematic methodology and that make clear, testable, nontrivial experimental predictions that deserve the attention of a wide community of scientists.
• Case studies - describe and critically evaluate individual laboratories, research groups or training programs - for example, how they attempt to foster discovery and collaboration, how they monitor productivity, lessons learned that can be generalized to other programs, and an analysis of factors that determine the rate of progress.
• Focus articles - short, opinionated, narrowly focused articles on issues of contemporary interest. They provide an opportunity for scientists to publish 'discovery diaries', which document the "unexpurgated" story behind a specific experimental study that was previously published in the peer-reviewed literature. What really happened, in what order? What were the relative roles of factors such as hypothesis, policy, collaboration, chance, error, rhetoric, critical pieces of information, and new methods?
• Reviews - comprehensive, authoritative, descriptions of any subject within the scope of the journal. These articles are usually written by opinion leaders that have been invited by the Editorial Board.
• Software articles - describe tools designed to enhance productivity, data mining, creative thinking, data synthesis, collaborative work, and so on. These tools must be available to the public, and need not necessarily be specific to scientific work but should be applicable to scientists. The article must contain some formal evaluation, either of system performance or of user behavior.
• Inquiries are invited for other article types such as commentaries and debate articles.

Peer review policies

All papers will be submitted online to the main editorial office and sent out for review, generally to two peer reviewers. Authors are encouraged to submit the names and contact information of several potential reviewers.

Reviewers, who are asked to provide anonymous reviews within three weeks of receipt, will consider whether the paper is novel, scientifically sound, topically relevant, balanced, coherent, complete and shows adequate literary quality and scholarship. In case of a split decision, a third review may be sought or an editorial decision may be made. All papers, regardless of article type, will be peer reviewed and open access.

Because the journal is directed at a broad multidisciplinary audience, prospective authors should make an attempt to minimize the use of specialized jargon and provide a brief overview or glossary for non-specialists. Articles that are scientifically sound, but judged too narrow in focus, may be declined.

Edited by Neil Smalheiser, Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration is supported by an international Editorial Board.

Publishing in Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration

All articles will be listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and will be covered by PubMed Central, CAS and Scopus.

Articles in Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. However, because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number.

The following citation:

J Biomed Discov Collaboration 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration, why not register to receive alerts? Registration also enables you to customise your subject areas of interest, store your searches, and submit your manuscripts.

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration is published  by BioMed Central, an independent publisher committed to ensuring peer-reviewed biomedical research is Open Access. That means it is freely and universally accessible online, it is archived in at least one internationally recognised free access repository, and its authors retain copyright, allowing anyone to reproduce or disseminate articles, according to the BioMed Central copyright and licence agreement. Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration however, has taken this further by making all its content Open Access.

Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration's articles are 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. The journal is also participating in the British Library's e-journals pilot project, and plans to deposit copies of all articles with the British Library.

BioMed Central is working closely with the Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration will be available.

Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration is able to deliver summaries of frequently updated content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. These are accessible via the orange "XML" button at the top of the list of recent articles or the list of most accessed articles. For more information about RSS feeds see our publisher's website.

For further information about general policies please see the instructions for authors.