About

Aims and scope

BMC Biotechnology is an open access, peer-reviewed journal that considers articles on the manipulation of biological macromolecules or organisms for use in experimental procedures, cellular and tissue engineering or in the pharmaceutical, agricultural biotechnology and allied industries.

The journal welcomes manuscripts that describe the manipulation, optimization and application of biological molecules, processes or organisms. Submissions are encouraged on topics that have an application either in research or in industry.

The journal welcomes manuscripts in the following broad sub-topics of biotechnology.

Applied immunology
Cellular, tissue and whole organism biotechnology
Drug discovery and delivery
Environmental biotechnology
Food and nutritional biotechnology
Genetic engineering
Mathematical modeling and biostatistics
Methods and technological advances
Microbial biotechnology
Plant and agricultural biotechnology
Systems and synthetic biology

BMC Biotechnology does not make editorial decisions on the basis of the interest of a study or its likely impact. Studies must be scientifically valid; for research articles this includes a scientifically sound research question, the use of suitable methods and analysis, and following community-agreed standards relevant to the research field. Specific criteria for other article types can be found in the submission guidelines.

Open access

All articles published by BMC Biotechnology 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.

As authors of articles published in BMC Biotechnology you are the copyright holders of your article and have granted to any third party, in advance and in perpetuity, the right to use, reproduce or disseminate your article, according to the BMC license agreement.

For those of you who are US government employees or are prevented from being copyright holders for similar reasons, BMC can accommodate non-standard copyright lines. Please contact us if further information is needed.

Article-processing charges

Open access publishing is not without costs. BMC Biotechnology therefore levies an article-processing charge of £1690.00/$2380.00/€1990.00 for each article accepted for publication, plus VAT or local taxes where applicable.

If the corresponding author's institution participates in our open access membership program, some or all of the publication cost may be covered (more details available on the membership page). We routinely waive charges for authors from low-income countries. For other countries, article-processing charge waivers or discounts are granted on a case-by-case basis to authors with insufficient funds. Authors can request a waiver or discount during the submission process. For further details, see our article-processing charge page.

BMC provides a free open access funding support service to help authors discover and apply for article processing charge funding. Visit our OA funding and policy support page to view our list of research funders and institutions that provide funding for APCs, and to learn more about our email support service.

Indexing services

All articles published in BMC Biotechnology are included in:

Biological Abstracts
BIOSIS
CABI
CAS
Citebase
Compedex
DOAJ
Embase
EmBiology
Food Science and Technology Abstracts
Global Health
MEDLINE
OAIster
PubMed
PubMed Central
Science Citation Index Expanded
SCImago
Scopus
SOCOLAR
Zetoc

The full text of all articles is deposited in digital archives around the world to guarantee long-term digital preservation. You can also access all articles published by BioMed Central on SpringerLink.

Peer-review policy

Peer-review is the system used to assess the quality of a manuscript before it is published. Independent researchers in the relevant research area assess submitted manuscripts for originality, validity and significance to help editors determine whether the manuscript should be published in their journal. You can read more about the peer-review process here.

BMC Biotechnology operates a single-blind peer-review system, where the reviewers are aware of the names and affiliations of the authors, but the reviewer reports provided to authors are anonymous.

The benefit of single-blind peer review is that it is the traditional model of peer review that many reviewers are comfortable with, and it facilitates a dispassionate critique of a manuscript.

Manuscripts submitted to BMC Biotechnology are assessed by our editors and/or peer reviewers. Overall editorial responsibility for the journal is with the Editor. Section Editors provide oversight for manuscripts submitted to their section with Associate Editors acting as handling editors.

BMC Biotechnology is part of the BMC series which publishes subject-specific journals focused on the needs of individual research communities across all scientific and clinical disciplines. We do not make editorial decisions on the basis of the interest of a study or its likely impact. Studies must be scientifically valid; for research articles this includes a scientifically sound research question, the use of suitable methods and analysis, and following community-agreed standards relevant to the research field.

Specific criteria for other article types can be found in the submission guidelines.

BMC series - open, inclusive and trusted.

Editorial policies

All manuscripts submitted to BMC Biotechnology should adhere to BioMed Central's editorial policies.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Appeals and complaints

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

Citing articles in BMC Biotechnology

Articles in BMC Biotechnology 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 Biotechnol [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 Biotechnol 2009, 1:115.

refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Benefits of publishing with BMC

High visibility

BMC Biotechnology's open access policy allows maximum visibility of articles published in the journal as they are available to a wide, global audience.

Speed of publication

BMC Biotechnology 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 will be published with their final citation after acceptance, in both fully browsable web form, and as a formatted PDF.

Flexibility

Online publication in BMC Biotechnology gives you 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 articles).

Promotion and press coverage

Articles published in BMC Biotechnology are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be highlighted on BMC Biotechnology’s pages and on the BMC homepage.

In addition, articles published in BMC Biotechnology 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 Biotechnology. A list of articles recently press-released by journals published by BMC is available here.

Copyright

As an author of an article published in BMC Biotechnology you retain the copyright of your article and you are free to reproduce and disseminate your work (for further details, see the BMC license agreement).

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