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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