How to proceed with Biology Direct's system of peer review

Biology Direct aims to provide authors and readers with a novel system of peer review. This will include making the author responsible for selecting potentially suitable reviewers of their manuscript, from 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.

Please make sure that you have read the specific information regarding the journal and its peer-review policies the general Instructions for Authors and the BioMed Central copyright and licence agreement before proceeding.

1. Scope: currently, Biology Direct can consider original research articles, hypotheses discovery notes and reviews that lie within the fields of Genomics, Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, Immunology, and Mathematical Biology - please check that your article is broadly within this scope (further subject areas will be launched from time to time until the full spectrum of biology is covered).
   
   
2. Manuscripts under consideration: any manuscript undergoing peer review for Biology Direct at the instigation of the author(s) is deemed to be under consideration and must not already have been published or be under consideration in another journal, although it may have been deposited on a preprint server. Please see the Editorial policies in the Biology Direct Instructions for Authors for Authors section for further details.
   
   
3. Article-processing charge: if you wish to publish in Biology Direct, you, the submitting author, will be required to arrange payment of a processing charge of £995 (approximately US$1620/€1135) before your article can be uploaded for publication. This fee helps to cover the cost of data conversion and permanent online hosting (see more information about BioMed Central's processing charges). If your institution is a BioMed Central member, it may cover the cost of all or part of the article-processing charge. In the case of genuine inability to pay, you will be able to request a waiver of the processing charge.
   
   

You will find details below on the simple steps required to facilitate peer review of your manuscript.

If you have any queries, please contact the Biology Direct Editorial Team.

1. Instructions for peer-review process
   1. Research Articles
   2. Discovery Notes
2. A set of email templates
3. What to do when peer review completed
4. Next steps

1. Submitting your manuscript for peer review

Please follow the steps below to carry out the peer review of your manuscript.

A. Research articles

Identify five members of the Editorial Board who you expect to be qualified and potentially willing to review the work.

The main requirement of Biology Direct is that three Editorial Board members assume responsibility for each published aarticle; either directly or through a reviewer nomination either by providing a review directly, or soliciting a review from a suitable colleague of their choice (you may wish to provide a list of your own recommendations in your covering letter). An Editorial Board member may solicit more than one review if s/he so wishes, but these will count only as the contribution of one Editorial Board member.

You should submit your manuscript using the online submission system. Please include the names and email addresses of five Editorial Board members you think would be suitable when asked for suggested peer reviewers.

The peer review process will be coordinated by BioMed Central staff. Once the required number of reviews have been received, you will be contacted by the editorial office with the reviewers’ reports, and instructed on how to proceed.

B. Discovery notes

The peer review process for discovery notes is similar to the process for research articles.
There are, however, some key differences:

• Only 2 Editorial Board members are required for review of the manuscript.
• Referees should be selected from the Editorial Board that is specifically set up for discovery notes.
• Reviewers should assess the validity of the article, and have the right to veto publication. The reviewers do not have to provide full comments/details of revisions but are welcome to do so. If reviewers provide no additional comments, their report should read:"I support publication of this manuscript"
• If either or both referees veto publication, the author should consider their manuscript rejected.

All other aspects of the peer review process remain the same as for research articles.

2. What to do when the peer-review process is complete

Intend to publish
When you have received the appropriate number of reviews, have made any of the recommended revisions that you wish to make and have decided you wish to proceed with publication, please submit the final version of the manuscript via the Biology Direct online submission system.

You should include the reviewer reports at the end of your manuscript, before the reference list, and proceed in one of the following ways:

1. Proceed to publication without responding to the reviewer comments, or revising your manuscript in light of them.

   To proceed in this way you should submit the manuscript, including the reviews, by logging into the online system and submitting a revised manuscript (please see instructions for including the reviewers’ comments below).

   You should indicate in your covering letter that you wish to proceed to publication at this point.

   
   
2. Respond and revise your manuscript in light of the reviewer comments.

   As part of the novel scheme of peer review operated by Biology Direct, authors are invited to provide responses to the reviewers’ comments, as well as revising their manuscript in light of the reviews.

   Please include your responses alongside the reviewer comments within the revised manuscript (please see instructions for including the reviewers’ comments below).

On submission, the revised manuscript and author responses will be sent to the reviewers for any final remarks prior to publication.

Please include the 'Reviewers' names' section at the end of the abstract*, the ‘Open peer review’ section after the abstract**, and the 'Reviewers' comments' in the main body of the text***.. Please refer to the instructions for authors for further details on formatting your article.

N.B. You may publish your manuscript even if the review(s) are negative, but remember that the reviewers' comments will be published alongside your article.

*Please insert this as a new paragraph at the end of the abstract:

Reviewers: This article was reviewed by XX, YY and ZZ. (NB please state if a reviewer was nominated by an Editorial Board member thus: XX (nominated by AA)).

**Please start a new page after the abstract and add in this section just before the Introduction/Background (this will aid navigation in the final published version):

Open peer review
Reviewed by XX, YY and ZZ. (NB please state if a reviewer was nominated by an Editorial Board member thus: XX (nominated by AA)). For the full reviews, please go to the Reviewers’ comments section.

***Please insert the reviewers' comments, together with each reviewer's name, under the heading Reviewers' comments in the following style:

Reviewers' comments
Reviewer's report 1
Name, Affiliation (nominated by Name, Affiliation if applicable)
Reviewer comments.

[Note: if you want to add your replies to any comment, please insert them preceded by Author's response: ]
[Note: If the reviewer has not returned their comments, please state "This reviewer provided no comments for publication."]

Insert the Reviewers' comments section in the following position:

• Abstract
• Open peer review
• Background
• Results and discussion
• Conclusions
• Materials and methods
• Additional data files
• Reviewers' comments
• Acknowledgements
• References

Intend to withdraw
Please inform the Biology Direct Editorial Team if you wish to withdraw from the peer-review process. In the event that you decide to pursue publication elsewhere, you must withdraw the manuscript from Biology Direct first, so as to avoid having it under consideration at two journals simultaneously.

4. Next steps

If you decide to proceed with publication, Biology Direct will confirm authorship of the reviewers' reports, gain your final consent to publish, confirm payment details for the article-processing charge, and proceed to the pre-accept production stage with any further author liaison that is necessary. If you do not hear from us within one week of submission please feel free to contact us.

It is normal to contact reviewers to let them know whether you have proceeded to publish your manuscript, including their review, in Biology Direct. Should you decide to proceed to publication, we will notify the reviewers when your manuscript is published. If, in the light of the reviews you elect not to go ahead with publication, we will send notification of your decision.