Bioinformatics Journal

Bioinformatics is happy to once again become an official journal of the ISCB in 2009. ISCB members are well represented among the Bioinformatics’ editorial team, we publish the ISMB Proceedings each year, and going forward we see many possibilities for forging further links between Bioinformatics and the ISCB.

Submissions to Bioinformatics continue thick and fast – we received over 2000 submissions in 2008, and 30% were accepted for publication. During 2008 we introduced a policy of seeking three high quality peer review reports where possible. We are pleased to say that this has not impacted on our fast review times, with the time from submission to first decision averaging 31 days in 2008. Once accepted, papers are usually published online within one week and in an issue within 8 weeks. Next-generation sequencing technologies have begun to revolutionise genomics and their effects are increasingly widespread. Bioinformatics publishes many relevant tools and algorithms on this topic, and to celebrate this contribution we have gathered these together in a ‘Bioinformatics for Next Generation Sequencing’ virtual issue (www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/bioinformatics/
nextgenerationsequencing.html
). This is a living resource which will continue to be updated to include the very latest papers in this area. We are also offering a prize for the best paper presented at the ISMB/ECCB 2009 SIG on Short Read Sequencing.Bioinformatics

Open policies
In all our activities we aim to help researchers disseminate their work easily and widely. Articles are published within days of acceptance online; the journal is accessible to thousands of institutions around the world including through the Oxford Journals Developing Countries initiative; and all articles are made freely available online after 12 months. This is also why we have an established software availability policy – requiring authors to make their software accessible – and an option of immediate open access, giving authors the choice of whether to publish under this model depending on the funds available to them. Did you know that Bioinformatics also deposits all articles that acknowledge NIH funding, and all open access articles, into PubMed Central on the authors’ behalf?

Finally we’d like to take this opportunity to thank ISCB members for their valued support of Bioinformatics as authors, reviewers and editorial board members.

With best regards,
Alex Bateman, Alfonso Valencia, and the Bioinformatics Editor team