BioMed Central has announced the launch of BMC Systems Biology, the first open access journal focussed solely on the entire emerging subject of systems biology.
A peer-reviewed online journal, BMC Systems Biology has just published its first articles online at www.biomedcentral.com/bmcsystbiol.
BMC Systems Biology publishes research articles describing systems-level analysis of biological events, whether experimental or theoretical, at the level of molecules, cells or organisms.
BMC Systems Biology is a new journal in the highly successful BMC-series from BioMed Central, the publisher of journals such as BMC Bioinformatics and Genome Biology. Like the other journals in the series, BMC Systems Biology publishes peer-reviewed research, software, database and methodology articles, all of which are immediately available without charge to any reader with Internet access. BMC Systems Biology encourages use of the Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML) and, like all of the BMC-series, makes XML of all published articles freely available to download for data and text-mining.
Dr Theodora Bloom, BioMed Central’s Editorial Director for Biology, said of the journal launch, “BioMed Central has a strong track record in this area - Genome Biology and BMC Bioinformatics are amongst the best journals in their fields. This reputation makes BioMed Central well-placed to launch BMC Systems Biology, and we have already seen a very positive response from the research community.”
The post-genomic discipline of ‘systems biology’ is fast growing, with an exponential increase in PubMed abstracts including the term systems biology. The approach taken by systems biologists is qualitatively different to the reductive approach traditional in many fields, and often involves collaboration between biologists, physicists and mathematicians. Reflecting the breadth of this new discipline, BMC Systems Biology aims to publish work ranging in focus from the analysis of metabolic networks, through neuronal networks and physiology, all the way up to analyses of ecosystems.
BMC Systems Biology’s editorial board includes Laurence Hurst, Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at the University of Bath, UK. Professor Hurst welcomes the launch of BMC Systems Biology, “In systems biology the devil is in the detail and the details are, to say the least, numerous. An open access outlet both with unlimited space, be it in the paper or in the vital supplementary information, and a requirement to provide the necessary detail, is greatly to be welcomed and BMC Systems Biology is an important boost for the field.”