BMC Research Notes (ISSN 1756-0500) is an online journal publishing short research reports after full peer review. All articles are published, without barriers to access, immediately upon acceptance. The journal is published by BioMed Central Ltd, Floor 6, 236 Gray's Inn Road, London, WC1X 8HL, United Kingdom.

Scope

BMC Research Notes is an open access journal publishing scientifically sound research across all fields of biology and medicine, enabling authors to publish data sets, small-scale clinical studies, reports of confirmatory or negative results, updates to previous research, methodology, software tools and databases, short correspondence items and hypotheses.

The aim of BMC Research Notes is to reduce the loss suffered by the research community when results remain unpublished because they do not form a sufficiently complete story to justify the publication of a full research article. A key objective of the journal is to ensure that associated data sets are published in standard, reusable formats whenever possible. Data sets published in the journal will be made searchable and easy to harvest for reuse.

Criteria for publication

Publication of research articles by BMC Research Notes is dependent primarily on their validity and coherence and whether the writing is comprehensible, as judged by peer reviewers.

Speed of publication

BMC Research Notes offers fast publication while 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 will be published electronically in manuscript form immediately upon acceptance. A fully structured web version, and accompanying laid out PDF, will be published within a few weeks of acceptance.

Flexibility

As an electronic-only journal, BMC Research Notes gives authors the opportunity to publish data sets, 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).

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts must be submitted to BMC Research Notes electronically using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

Indexing and archiving

Following publication in BMC Research Notes, the full text of each article is immediately and permanently 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. BMC Research Notes is indexed/tracked/covered by PubMed, CAS and Google Scholar.

Copyright

The authors are the copyright holders for all articles in BMC Research Notes 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 rules.

Citing papers in the journal

Articles in BMC Research Notes should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal, with one exception. Because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number.

The following citation:

BMC Res Notes 2000, 1:2

refers to article 2 from volume 1 of the journal.

As an online journal, BMC Research Notes does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

Contacting BMC Research Notes

Queries about content, submissions, or the review process should be directed to researchnotes@biomedcentral.com. All other enquiries should be directed to info@biomedcentral.com.