Biology Direct - Aims and Scope

• To remove the journal's role in reviewer selection, making the author responsible for obtaining three reviewers' reports, via the journal's Editorial Board
• To make the process of peer review open, rather than anonymous, thus eliminating the principal sources of abuse in the refereeing process
• By making the reviewers' reports public, to increase the responsibility of the referees and to provide readers with pointers as to the content and value of a publication

1. The Editors-in-Chief will assemble, for each subject area, a panel of potential reviewers who have agreed in advance to serve the journal and will form the Editorial Board.
2. An author who wishes to submit a research article to the journal will consult the relevant subject panel and attempt to find three appropriate Board members to peer review the article.
3. The journal will insist that the initially requested reviewers are drawn from the Editorial Board.
4. In essence, an article is rejected from the journal if no appropriate Board member agrees to review it.
5. Reviewers are asked to undertake a two-stage review, because once they agree formally to review an article they are essentially recommending eventual acceptance and publication. The first step for a reviewer is to skim-read the article so as to allow the reviewer to form an overall opinion of the article; if they feel they cannot have their name associated with the publication of this article, they can decline to provide a formal review. But if they agree to review, the second step is for the reviewer to prepare comments for the author but also, if they wish, to prepare 'public' comments, however critical, that will appear alongside the final version of the article when it is published.
6. There will be a fairly tight time frame for the review process: if a Board member does not respond to a request for review within 72 hours, this will be considered to be a 'decline to review' and the author will seek another reviewer. However, once a Board member agrees to review a manuscript, s/he will have 3 weeks to deliver the review. If the reviewer does not deliver comments promptly, the author will be in a position to elect to publish the paper accompanied by the name of the reviewer but without comments.
7. The authors will be in a position to withdraw the manuscript if they do not wish to see it published alongside the reviews that have been received. The same article may not then be submitted through other Board members.
8. As a safeguard against pseudoscience, a board member reviewing a manuscript will have the option, in addition to writing a negative review, to alert the Editors-in-Chief that, in her/his opinion, a particular manuscript is not a legitimate scientific work and therefore should nto be published in any form. The Editors-in-Chief will make the final decision in such (rare) cases.

• Full searchability of all information contained in the public areas of the website
• Non-public areas for the Editors, Editorial Board, referees and authors, providing information, communication routes and tools to expedite the peer review process.
• Links throughout the site to other relevant information (for example, references to PubMed, author names to e-mail and personal/lab websites, accession numbers to centralized databases, and so on).
• Registered users can store searches, receive updates, forward articles to others and enter into discussion about published articles.
• Contents alerting by e-mail.
• Customization of the journals pages to suit each reader's needs and preferences.