About Biology Direct

What is Biology Direct?

Biology Direct will serve the life science research community as an open access, peer-reviewed online journal encompassing the full spectrum of biological science, and will make all research articles available free of charge on the website immediately on publication.

Biology Direct's key aim is to provide authors and readers with an alternative to the traditional model of peer review. This includes making the author responsible for obtaining reviewers' reports via the journal's Editorial Board; making the peer review process open rather than anonymous; and making the reviewers' reports public, thus increasing the responsibility of the referees and eliminating sources of abuse in the refereeing process.

Edited by Eugene V Koonin, Laura F Landweber and David J Lipman, Biology Direct is supported by an international Editorial Board.

Content overview

Biology Direct aims to publish original research articles, hypotheses, and reviews from the full spectrum of biology; the first subject areas launched are Genomics, Bioinformatics, Systems Biology and Immunology and Mathematical Biology. Further subject areas will be launched from time to time until the full spectrum of biology is covered. Subjects covered will include any aspect of molecular, cellular, organismal or population biology, as well as methods, theoretical and computational biology, comparative biology, and evolution.

Biology Direct considers the following types of articles:

• Research: reports of data from original research.
• 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.
• Hypotheses: short articles presenting an untested original hypothesis backed solely by previously published results rather than any new evidence.
• Comment: short, narrowly focused articles of contemporary interest, usually commissioned by the journal (these are not mini-reviews).
• Discovery notes: brief reports of specific discoveries made by computational analysis of nucleic acid and/or protein sequences, structures or other data, with novel observations and conclusions about the function, organization, or evolution of proteins, genes or genomes.

Peer review policies

Biology Direct aims to provide a unique service to authors and readers of research articles, with a novel system of peer review. Key peer review aims are:

• 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.

These aims will be put into practice as follows.

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 Editorial Board members to peer review the article. Editorial Board members can nominate a reviewer in their place. Only reviewers directly nominated by an Editorial Board member are eligible for review.
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 three Editorial Board members do not agree to review it.
5. Any reviewer-author pair (both directions) will be allowed to appear in the journal no more than four times a year.
6. Any author will be allowed to publish no more than two articles per year with the same three reviewers.
7. 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. The reviewer comments to be published can take into account any revisions to the manuscript and therefore might differ substantially from the original comments to the authors, at the reviewer's discretion. The reviewer can also choose to publish no comments with the manuscript in which case it will be indicated, under the reviewer's name, that "This reviewer made no comments for publication".
8. There will be a fairly tight time frame for the review process: if an Editorial 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 an Editorial 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 manuscript accompanied by the name of the reviewer but without comments.
9. 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 Editorial Board members.
10. As a safeguard against pseudoscience, an Editorial Board member reviewing a manuscript will have the option, in addition to writing a negative review, to alert the Editors-in-Chief that, in his/her opinion, a particular manuscript is not a legitimate scientific work and therefore should not be published in any form. The Editors-in-Chief will make the final decision in such (rare) cases.

For further information, please see the instructions on how to proceed with Biology Direct's system of peer review. Please note the peer review requirements for discovery notes differ slightly from the process outlined above; please click here for full details.

Edited by Eugene V Koonin, Laura F Landweber and David J Lipman, Biology Direct is supported by an expert Editorial Board.

Publishing in Biology Direct

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

Articles in Biology Direct 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:

Biol Direct 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

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

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Biology Direct, 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 Biology Direct using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Biology Direct 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. Biology Direct however, has taken this further by making all its content Open Access.

Biology Direct's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also 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 Biology Direct will be available.

Biology Direct 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.