About BMC Pharmacology

This page includes information about the aims and scope of BMC Pharmacology, editorial policies, open access, the peer review process and other information. For details of how to prepare and submit a manuscript through the online submission system, please see the instructions for authors.

Scope

BMC Pharmacology is an open access, peer-reviewed journal that considers articles on aspects of the discovery, design, uses, effects, modes of action and metabolism of chemically defined therapeutic and toxic agents.

It is journal policy to publish work deemed by peer reviewers to be a coherent and sound addition to scientific knowledge and to put less emphasis on interest levels, provided that the research constitutes a useful contribution to the field.

Editorial team

Executive Editor

Christopher Morrey

Deputy Series Editor

Maria Kowalczuk

Series Editor (Biology)

Elizabeth Moylan

Senior Managing Editor

Diana Marshall

Publisher

Jo Appleford-Cook

Open access

All articles published by BMC Pharmacology are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Further information about open access can be found here.

Authors of articles published in BMC Pharmacology are the copyright holders of their articles and have granted to any third party, in advance and in perpetuity, the right to use, reproduce or disseminate the article, according to the BioMed Central copyright and license agreement.

Article-processing charges

Open access publishing is not without costs. BMC Pharmacology therefore levies an article-processing charge of £1230/$1930/€1535 for each article accepted for publication. We routinely waive charges for authors from low-income countries. Generally, if the submitting author's institution is a Member the cost of the article-processing charge is covered by the membership, and no further charge is payable. In the case of authors whose institutions are Supporter Members, however, a discounted article-processing charge is payable by the author. For further details, see our article-processing charge page.

Indexing services

BioMed Central is working closely with Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in BMC Pharmacology will be available.

Publication and peer review process

Publication of research articles by BMC Pharmacology is dependent primarily on their scientific validity and coherence as judged by our external expert editors and/or peer reviewers, who will also assess whether the writing is comprehensible and whether the work represents a useful contribution to the field.

Authors will be able to check the progress of their manuscript through the submission system at any time by logging into My BMC Pharmacology, a personalized section of the site.

Portability of peer review

In order to support efficient and thorough peer review, we aim to reduce the number of times a manuscript is re-reviewed after rejection from BMC Pharmacology, thereby speeding up the publication process and reducing the burden on peer reviewers. Therefore, please note that, if a manuscript is not accepted for publication in BMC Pharmacology and the authors choose to submit a revised version to another BioMed Central journal, we will pass the reviews on to the other journal's editors at the authors' request. We will reveal the reviewers' names to the handling editor for editorial purposes unless reviewers let us know when they return their report that they do not wish us to share their report with another BioMed Central journal.

Reprints

High-quality, bound reprints can be purchased for all articles published. Please see our reprints website for further information about ordering reprints, and to enquire about further details, including fees, please contact BioMed Central's reprint service.

Supplements

BMC Pharmacology will consider supplements based on proceedings (full articles or meeting abstracts), reviews or research. All articles submitted for publication in supplements are subject to peer review. Published supplements are fully searchable and freely accessible online and can also be produced in print. All full length articles (proceedings, reviews or research articles) are indexed by PubMed. PubMed displays the title of the supplement only in the case of meeting abstract collections. For further information, please contact us.

Editorial policies

Any manuscript, or substantial parts of it, submitted to the journal must not be under consideration by any other journal. In general, the manuscript should not have already been published in any journal or other citable form, although it may have been deposited on a preprint server. Information on duplicate/overlapping publications can be found here. Authors are required to ensure that no material submitted as part of a manuscript infringes existing copyrights, or the rights of a third party.

Correspondence concerning articles published in BMC Pharmacology is encouraged. A 'post a comment' feature is available on all articles published by BMC Pharmacology. Comments will be moderated by the editorial office (see our Comment policy for further information) and linked to the full-text version of the article, if suitable.

Editorial standards

BioMed Central is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Ethical guidelines

Submission of a manuscript to BMC Pharmacology implies that all authors have read and agreed to its content. Research involving human subjects (including human material or human data) that is reported in the manuscript must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. A statement detailing this, including the name of the ethics committee and the reference number where appropriate, must appear in the Methods section of all manuscripts reporting research on human subjects. If a study has been granted an exemption from requiring ethics approval, this should also be detailed in the Methods section. Further information and documentation to support this should be made available to Editors on request. Manuscripts may be rejected if the Editors consider that the research has not been carried out within an ethical framework. In rare cases, the Editors may contact the ethics committee for further information.

For all research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate in the study should be obtained from participants (or their parent or guardian in the case of children) and a statement to this effect should appear in the Methods section of the manuscript.

For all articles that include information or images relating to individual participants, written informed consent for the publication of these images must be obtained from the participant (or their parent or guardian in the case of children) and a statement to this effect should be included in the manuscript. These documents must be made available to Editors if requested, and will be treated confidentially.

For research carried out on animals, authors are encouraged to comply with the "Animal Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments" (ARRIVE) guidelines and must comply with local or institutional ethics approval requirements on the care and use of animals for research. A statement detailing such ethics approval and/or guidelines must be included in the Methods section. Relevant information should be included in the appropriate section of the article as outlined in the guidelines.

BMC Pharmacology's publisher, BioMed Central, has a legal responsibility to ensure that its journals do not publish material that infringes copyright, or that includes libellous or defamatory content. If, on review, your manuscript is perceived to contain potentially libellous content the journal Editors, with assistance from the publisher if required, will work with authors to ensure an appropriate outcome is reached.

The involvement of scientific (medical) writers or anyone else who assisted with the preparation of the manuscript content should be acknowledged, along with their source of funding, as described in the European Medical Writers Association (EMWA) guidelines on the role of medical writers in developing peer-reviewed publications. If medical writers are not listed among the authors, their role should be acknowledged explicitly.

Data and materials release

Submission of a manuscript to BMC Pharmacology implies that readily reproducible materials described in the manuscript, including all relevant raw data, will be freely available to any scientist wishing to use them for non-commercial purposes.

Any 'in press' articles cited within the references and necessary for the reviewers' assessment of the manuscript should be made available if requested by the editorial office.

Appeals and complaints

Authors who wish to appeal a rejection or make a complaint should, in the first instance, contact the Series Editor who will provide details of the journal's complaints procedure.

Competing interests

BMC Pharmacology requires authors to declare any competing financial or other interest in relation to their work. All competing interests that are declared will be listed at the end of published articles. Where an author gives no competing interests, the listing will read 'The author(s) declare that they have no competing interests'.

Plagiarism detection

BMC Pharmacology's publisher, BioMed Central, is a member of the CrossCheck plagiarism detection initiative. In cases of suspected plagiarism CrossCheck is available to the editors of BMC Pharmacology to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts. CrossCheck is a multi-publisher initiative allowing screening of published and submitted content for originality.

Citing articles in BMC Pharmacology

Articles in BMC Pharmacology should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. Because articles are not printed, they do not have page numbers; instead, they are given a unique article number.

Article citations follow this format:

Authors: Title. BMC Pharmacol [year], [volume number]:[article number].

e.g. Roberts LD, Hassall DG, Winegar DA, Haselden JN, Nicholls AW, Griffin JL: Increased hepatic oxidative metabolism distinguishes the action of Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor delta from Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor gamma in the Ob/Ob mouse. BMC Pharmacol 2009, 1:115.

refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Why publish your article in BMC Pharmacology?

High visibility

BMC Pharmacology's open access policy allows maximum visibility of articles published in the journal as they are available to a wide, global audience. Articles that have been especially highly accessed are highlighted with a 'Highly accessed' graphic, which appears on the journal's contents pages and search results.

Speed of publication

BMC Pharmacology offers a fast publication schedule whilst maintaining rigorous peer review; all articles must be submitted online, and peer review is managed fully electronically (articles are distributed in PDF form, which is automatically generated from the submitted files). Articles are published with their final citation immediately upon acceptance in a provisional PDF form. The article will subsequently be published in both fully browsable web form, and as a formatted PDF; the article will then be available through BMC Pharmacology, BioMed Central and PubMed Central and will also be included in PubMed.

Flexibility

Online publication in BMC Pharmacology gives authors the opportunity to publish large datasets, large numbers of color illustrations and moving pictures, to display data in a form that can be read directly by other software packages so as to allow readers to manipulate the data for themselves, and to create all relevant links (for example, to PubMed, to sequence and other databases, and to other papers).

Promotion and press coverage

Articles published in BMC Pharmacology are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be included in abstract books mailed to academics and are highlighted on BMC Pharmacology's pages and on the BioMed Central homepage.

In addition, articles published in BMC Pharmacology may be promoted by press releases to the general or scientific press. These activities increase the exposure and number of accesses for articles published in BMC Pharmacology. A list of articles recently press-released by journals published by BioMed Central is available here.

Copyright

Authors of articles published in BMC Pharmacology retain the copyright of their articles and are free to reproduce and disseminate their work (for further details, see the BioMed Central copyright and license agreement).

For further information about the advantages of publishing in a journal from BioMed Central, please click here.