About Source Code for Biology and Medicine

What is Source Code for Biology and Medicine?

Source Code for Biology and Medicine is a peer-reviewed open access, online journal that publishes articles on source code employed over a wide range of applications in biology and medicine.

The journal's aim is to publish source code for distribution and use in the public domain in order to advance biological and medical research. Through this dissemination, it may be possible to shorten the time required for solving certain computational problems for which there is limited source code availability or resources.

Fundamentally, the overarching computation-related goals of the journal are to:

• Increase productivity among source code users working on problems of public and environmental health importance
• Reduce discovery times in molecular and genomic sciences
• Reduce search times for source code applied in biological and medical research
• Provide a historical reflection of source code applied in various fields
• Serve as a repository for source code

Content overview

Source Code for Biology and Medicine considers the following types of articles:

• Original research: reports of data from original research. Describe novel implementation of source code used for acquiring new results, not previously published elsewhere. Research articles require complete source code files with compiled executables, libraries, or class modules (object-oriented programming with use of class libraries is the recommended programming style)..
• Methodology articles: discuss first-time publication of source code for a commonly used approach, for which code is not widely available in peer-reviewed biomedical literature. Methodology articles require complete source code files with compiled executables, libraries, or class modules (object-oriented programming with use of class libraries is the recommended programming style).
• Brief reports:short synopsis of applied algorithm without publication of the source code.
• Software reviews:discuss the application of published workflow or algorithm source code.

Peer review policies

The target turnaround time for manuscript review is two weeks. All manuscripts will be reviewed anonymously by at least two referees.

Review criteria include scope and originality, linguistic quality, comprehensiveness in background history, completeness in descriptions of data and samples used and methods implemented, discussion of results in connection with data used and results from other studies, benchmarking with other algorithms using simulated and/or empirical data sets, comparison with other codes, referencing and citations, and adequacy of tables and figures. A description of other availability is required.

Acceptance/rejection criteria are to accept without change, accept with minor modifications, review after modifications, or reject (unsuitable for publication).

Edited by Emmanuel Ifeachor and Leif Peterson, Source Code for Biology and Medicine is supported by an international Editorial Board.

Publishing in Source Code for Biology and Medicine

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

Articles in Source Code for Biology and Medicine 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:

Source Code Biol Med 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Source Code for Biology and Medicine does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

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

General journal policies

Source Code for Biology and Medicine 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. Source Code for Biology and Medicine however, has taken this further by making all its content Open Access.

Source Code for Biology and Medicine'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 Source Code for Biology and Medicine will be available.

Source Code for Biology and Medicine 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.