About Journal of Biomedical Semantics

What is Journal of Biomedical Semantics?

Journal of Biomedical Semantics is an open access journal that encompasses all aspects of semantic resources used for data integration, modeling, interpretation and exploitation in biomedical research.

Research in biology and biomedicine relies on various types of biomedical data, information and knowledge, represented in databases with experimental and/or curated data, ontologies, literature, taxonomies, etc. Semantics is essential for accessing, integrating and analyzing such data. The ability to explicitly extract, assign and manage semantic representations is crucial for making computational approaches in the biomedical domain productive for a large user community.

Journal of Biomedical Semantics aims to address issues of semantic enrichment and semantic processing in the biomedical domain, and comprises practical and theoretical advances in biomedical semantics research with implications for data analysis.

In recent years, the availability and use of electronic resources representing biomedical knowledge has greatly increased, covering ontologies, taxonomies, literature, databases, and bioinformatics services. These electronic resources contribute to advances in the biomedical domain and require interoperability between them through various semantic descriptors. In addition, the availability and integration of semantic resources is a key part in facilitating semantic web approaches for life sciences leading into reasoning and other advanced ways to analyse biomedical data.

The scope of the journal covers two main areas:

• Infrastructure for biomedical semantics, focusing on semantic resources and repositories, meta-data management and resource description, knowledge representation and semantic frameworks, Biomedical Semantic Web, semantic interoperability, and particularly, life-long management of semantic resources.
• Semantic mining, annotation and analysis, focusing on approaches and applications of semantic resources and tools for investigation, reasoning, prediction and discoveries in biomedicine.

Content overview

Journal of Biomedical Semantics considers the following types of articles:

• Research: original and novel research on practical and theoretical advances in biomedical semantics research with implications for data analysis.
• Short reports: brief reports on case studies, experiments, tests, evaluations and procedures that use semantic resources for biomedical research, including tools and services that have been developed to support knowledge-based and semantics-driven approaches to biomedical research.
• Database articles: descriptions of a new or a substantially improved database or other resource (including ontologies, taxonomies, terminologies, corpora and repositories), that have been developed to support knowledge-based and semantics-driven biomedical research.
• Reviews: comprehensive, authoritative, descriptions of any subject within the scope of the journal. These articles are usually written by experts in the field, who have been invited by the Editorial Board.

Peer review policies

Journal of Biomedical Semantics operates a 'closed' peer review system. Manuscripts submitted to the journal are reviewed by at least two experts selected by the Editors, with the aim of reaching a decision as soon as possible. Reviewers are required to declare any competing interests.

Edited by Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann and Goran Nenadic, Journal of Biomedical Semantics is supported by an expert Editorial Board.

Publishing in Journal of Biomedical Semantics

All articles are listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and are covered by PubMed Central.

Articles in Journal of Biomedical Semantics should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. However, because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number.

The following citation:

J Biomed Sem 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Journal of Biomedical Semantics does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Journal of Biomedical Semantics, why not register to receive alerts? Registration also enables you to customise your subject areas of interest, store your searches, and submit your manuscripts.

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to Journal of Biomedical Semantics using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Journal of Biomedical Semantics is published by BioMed Central, part of Springer Science+Business Media. BioMed Central is committed to ensuring peer-reviewed biomedical research is open access. That means it is freely and universally accessible online, it is archived in at least one internationally recognised free access repository, and its authors retain copyright, allowing anyone to reproduce or disseminate articles, according to the BioMed Central copyright and licence agreement. Journal of Biomedical Semantics however, has taken this further by making all its content open access.

Journal of Biomedical Semantics's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also at INIST in France and in e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands' digital archive of all electronic publications. The journal is also participating in the British Library's e-journals pilot project, and plans to deposit copies of all articles with the British Library.

Journal of Biomedical Semantics is able to deliver summaries of frequently updated content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. These are accessible via the orange "XML" button at the top of the list of recent articles or the list of most accessed articles. For more information about RSS feeds see our publisher's website.

For further information about general policies please see the instructions for authors.