Update on PLoS Computational Biology
Our
journal (http://compbiol.plos.org)
was started based on the following premise:
PLoS
Computational Biology features works of exceptional significance that
further our understanding of living systems at all scales through the
application of computational methods.
I am pleased to report that after five monthly issues
I believe we have met this goal and the future looks exceptionally bright
for providing a home for reviews, perspectives, research articles and
educational materials that show our computational work is making a distinct
difference to the understanding of biology at a variety of scales. Many
people have commented to me on the quality of the research, the timeliness
and depth of reviews and the professionalism exhibited by PLoS staff.
I am proud to be part of this effort. Here are a few statistics on how
we are doing.
From January 1 through September 20 (the first issue was in June) 2005
a total of 227 research articles were submitted; 87 were rejected before
review, 50 after review, 34 were accepted and 37 are active. Overall acceptance
rate is 20% thus far. The average time taken for all first decisions was
27.2 days, with a mean reject before review time of 8.3 days and a reject
after review time of 43.0 days. We are working to reduce this time.
By the end of September a total of 4,110 people had signed up to receive
an electronic email table of contents and a total of 45,163 full text
articles had been downloaded. A total of 121,621 RSS feeds have been accessed.
The Editorial Board has been expanded to accommodate the type of papers
being submitted, particularly in the area of neurobiology and modeling
of complex systems. New initiatives are planed including a video archive
of seminal lectures, a special session at ISMB 2006 in Brazil and a new
educational section of the journal.
The International Society for Computational Biology (ISMB) has assigned
Anna Tramontano as Editor to the journal to oversee Society contributions
to the journal and these are now being published on a monthly basis.
As a journal intended to serve the community we continually welcome your
ideas and suggestions for improvement. If you want to see some of the
ideas we have in mind take a look at http://compbiol.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pcbi.0010034.
It only remains me to thank our outstanding Editorial Board as well as
Steven Brenner, Rocky Choi, Andy Collins, Mike Eisen, Catherine Nancarrow,
Mark Patterson and Chris Sander for getting us this far.
Philip E. Bourne
Editor in Chief, PLoS Computational Biology