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About Microbial Cell Factories

Aims and scope | Open access | Article-processing charges | Indexing services | Publication and peer review process | Editorial policies | Citing articles in Microbial Cell Factories | Why publish your article in Microbial Cell Factories?

This page includes information about the aims and scope of Microbial Cell Factories, 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

Microbial Cell Factories is an open access, peer-reviewed, online journal that covers any topic related to the development, use and investigation of microbial cells as producers of recombinant proteins and natural products, or as catalyzers of biological transformations of industrial interest. Microbial Cell Factories is the world leading, primary research journal fully focusing on Applied Microbiology.

Microbial Cell Factories is aimed at microbiologists, biochemists, structural and environmental biologists and to any biotechnologist interested in biological or technical aspects of the Microbial Cell Factories.

The journal approaches microbial biotechnology from an angle not covered by any other biotechnology and microbiology journal - by stressing the cell factory concept and considering not only the final products but also the physiology of the producing cell.

The Cell Factory concept being the nuclear basis of the scope of the journal, Microbial Cell Factories will not consider manuscripts:

  • merely focusing on the biochemical, structural or functional characterization of recombinant proteins or other cellular products, even though obtained in microbial cells.
  • describing minor protocol modifications or moderate improvements in the yields of already described products, devoid of practical implications
  • focusing on process modeling, unless this approach is to complement a complete experimental study.
  • describing the construction of new or improved cloning vectors, with no clear impact on the cell factory concept.
  • offering the sequences of newly isolated genes outwith the cell factory concept
  • analyzing physiologic, metabolic, proteomic or genomic aspects of cell factories unrelated to the production/transformation potential of the cell.
  • that do not offer significant advances over the current state-of-the-art regarding the Cell Factory concept and/or their tools. Authors are encouraged to stress the novelty and significance of their findings in the cover letter.

Open access

All articles published by Microbial Cell Factories 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 Microbial Cell Factories 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. Microbial Cell Factories therefore levies an article-processing charge of £1115/$1715/€1310 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

All articles published in Microbial Cell Factories are included in PubMed, the most widely used biomedical bibliographic database service, which is run by the US National Library of Medicine. Other bibliographic databases that index articles published in Microbial Cell Factories include:

  • Biological Abstracts
  • BIOSIS
  • CAS
  • Citebase
  • Embase
  • EmBiology
  • Google Scholar
  • Index Copernicus
  • MEDLINE
  • OAIster
  • PubMed
  • PubMed Central
  • Science Citation Index Expanded
  • SCImago
  • Scirus
  • Scopus
  • SOCOLAR
  • Zetoc

The full text of all research articles is deposited in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and other digital archives including e-Depot (The Netherlands).

Microbial Cell Factories is tracked by Thomson Reuters (ISI)and has an Impact Factor of 3.55.

Publication and peer review process

Criteria for publication

Microbial Cell Factoriesconsiders the following types of articles:

  • Research: reports of original research describing experimental findings on the microbial cell factory concept from any of its multiple sides.
  • 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. They focus on specific issues and are about 1500 words.
  • Reviews: comprehensive, authoritative, descriptions of any subject within the scope of Microbial Cell Factories. These articles are usually written by opinion leaders that have been invited by the Editorial Board. They can be submitted either upon specific invitation or editorial acceptance of an author's proposal. To submit a proposal, authors should send a tentative title and abstract to the Editorial Office, justify their expertise in the target area, and explain both the scientific relevance and the absence of recent reviews on the topic.
  • Technical Notes: should present a new experimental method, test or procedure. The method described may either be completely new, or may offer a better version of an existing method. The article must describe a demonstrable advance on what is currently available. The method needs to have been well tested and ideally, but not necessarily, used in a way that proves its value.

Peer-review policies

Submitted manuscripts are immediately sent for revision to two external reviewers with recognized expertise in the field, and to a member of the editorial board. Since the electronic procedure allows fast communication, the reviewers are asked to complete their revision within 20 days. The editorial decision is taken with at least two reports.

Edited by Antonio Villaverde, Microbial Cell Factories 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 Microbial Cell Factories, a personalized section of the site.

Reprints

High-quality, bound reprints can be purchased for all articles published. Please see our reprints website for further information about ordering reprints.

Supplements

Microbial Cell Factories 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

All manuscripts submitted to Microbial Cell Factories should adhere to BioMed Central's editorial policies.

Citing articles in Microbial Cell Factories

Articles in Microbial Cell Factories 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. Microb Cell Fact [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. Microb Cell Fact 2009, 1:115.

refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Why publish your article in Microbial Cell Factories?

High visibility

Microbial Cell Factories'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

Microbial Cell Factories 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 Microbial Cell Factories, BioMed Central and PubMed Central and will also be included in PubMed.

Flexibility

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

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

Authors of articles published in Microbial Cell Factories 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.