Commissioning leaders in the field and experts in particular areas to submit discursive articles to the journal is a way to get the journal noticed and to declare that it has an interest in publishing in a particular subject area.

Why commission?

• Commissioning reviews or commentaries from well-respected experts in the field can enhance the reputation of the journal in the field
• Commissioning an article in a topical or emerging area not only indicates to the journal’s audience that publication is up to date, but may also attract more research articles from this area.
• If you would like to attract more research submissions on a particular aspect of the journals scope, commissioning a review on this area helps indicate to your audience that the journal is interested in publishing in this area and may, in turn, attract more research.

Commissioning ideas

As Editor of the journal, you may have a number of ideas for review or commentary articles that you would like to commission. We also recommend regularly asking your Editorial Board for commissioning suggestions (both the topic area and author), as well as keeping an eye on the latest ‘hot’ topics at conferences and commissioning articles on these.

Commissioning

When inviting an author to write a review or commentary for the journal, make sure you provide them with:

• Guidelines on the title or scope of the proposed article, as well as the expected format of the article (we recommend pointing them to the instructions for authors).
• Background information on the journal, so that they can tailor their article to the journal’s audience.
• A clear deadline of when you would like to receive the article (we recommend three months).

Once received, all articles should be fully peer reviewed, in line with the journal’s policies.

As all articles in the journal are open access, there is an article-processing charge (APC) levied for each article. We appreciate this can cause a hurdle when commissioning content for the journal and for this reason there is an allowance for free publication of a set number of non-research articles per year (detailed in the current Editor’s contract introduced in 2006). This quota can be used to cover the APCs of articles commissioned for the journal. Alternatively, you can commission articles from researchers who work at BioMed Central member institutions, where the cost of APC is covered.

We hope this document has helped you better understand how and why to encourage some authors to use copy-editing services prior to submission of their manuscripts. If you have any questions, please do feel free to contact the independent journals team.