About Cell Communication and Signaling

This page includes information about the aims and scope of Cell Communication and Signaling, editorial policies, open access and article-processing charges, 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.

Aims & scope

Cell Communication and Signaling, the official journal of the Signal Transduction Society, is an open access, peer-reviewed, online journal that encompasses all basic and translational aspects of cellular communications and signaling pathways in normal and pathological conditions.

Genetic and epigenetic changes, cell-cell, cell-environment and cell-pathogen interactions often modulate or even override programmed patterns of cell behaviour. Cell signaling is therefore not only critical for normal cell growth and development, but abnormal signals are associated with numerous human diseases. Cell Communication and Signaling strongly encourages reports of studies incorporating molecular, morphological, biochemical, structural and cell biology approaches, as well as interdisciplinary work and innovative in silico, in vitro and in vivo models models that facilitate investigations of cell signaling pathways, networks and cell behaviour.

Open access

All articles published by Cell Communication and Signaling 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 Cell Communication and Signaling 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. Cell Communication and Signaling therefore levies an article-processing charge of £1150/$1820/€1430 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. A limited number of waivers for article-processing charges are also available at the editors' discretion, and authors wishing to apply for these waivers should contact the editors.

Indexing services

Cell Communication and Signaling has an unofficial impact factor of 4.03. BioMed Central is working with Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in Cell Communication and Signaling will be available.

Publication and peer review process

Criteria for publication

Cell Communication and Signaling considers the following types of articles:

• Research - reports of data from original research.
• Commentaries - short, focused and opinionated articles on any subject within the journal's scope. These articles are usually related to a contemporary issue, such as recent research findings, and are often written by opinion leaders invited by the Editorial Board.
• Debate articles - present an argument that is not essentially based on practical research. Debate articles can report on all aspects of the subject including sociological and ethical issues.
• Hypotheses - short articles presenting an untested original hypothesis backed solely by previously published results rather than any new evidence.
• Methodology articles - present a new experimental method, test or procedure.
• Reviews - providing an up-to-date and balanced overview of an interesting topic or active research area.
• Short reports - brief reports of data from original research.

Peer review policy

Cell Communication and Signaling has enlisted the services of an Editorial Board with broad expertise in many relevant research areas, but will also solicit the help of other specialists as required. Each member of the Board is involved with strong research programs into many aspects of normal and/or pathological cell and tissue functions, and will make every effort to fulfil the mandate of the journal. The Board promise to conduct and facilitate unbiased and critical reviews of manuscripts and will strive to expedite the communication of work that is original, scientifically sound and thought provoking.

Edited by Stephan Feller, Cell Communication and Signaling is supported by an expert Editorial Board.

Authors will be able to check the progress of their manuscript through the submission system at any time by logging into My Cell Communication and Signaling, 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 Cell Communication and Signaling, 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 Cell Communication and Signaling 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

Cell Communication and Signaling 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 Cell Communication and Signaling is encouraged. A 'post a comment' feature is available on all articles published by Cell Communication and Signaling. 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).

Data and materials release

Submission of a manuscript to Cell Communication and Signaling 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 Editor-in-Chief who will provide details of the journal's complaints procedure.

Competing interests

Cell Communication and Signaling 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

Cell Communication and Signaling'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 Cell Communication and Signaling 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 Cell Communication and Signaling

Articles in Cell Communication and Signaling 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. Cell Commun Signal [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. Cell Commun Signal 2009, 1:115.

refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Why publish your article in Cell Communication and Signaling?

High visibility

Cell Communication and Signaling'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

Cell Communication and Signaling 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 Cell Communication and Signaling, BioMed Central and PubMed Central and will also be included in PubMed.

Flexibility

Online publication in Cell Communication and Signaling 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 Cell Communication and Signaling are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be included in abstract books mailed to academics and are highlighted on Cell Communication and Signaling's pages and on the BioMed Central homepage.

In addition, articles published in Cell Communication and Signaling 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 Cell Communication and Signaling. A list of articles recently press-released by journals published by BioMed Central is available here.

Copyright

Authors of articles published in Cell Communication and Signaling 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.