About Journal of Cheminformatics

What is Journal of Cheminformatics?

Journal of Cheminformatics is an open access, peer-reviewed, online journal encompassing all aspects of cheminformatics and molecular modelling including:

• chemical information systems, software and databases, and molecular modelling
• chemical structure representations and their use in structure, substructure, and similarity searching of chemical substance and chemical reaction databases
• computer and molecular graphics, computer-aided molecular design, expert systems, QSAR, and data mining techniques

The Journal of Cheminformatics offers scientists the opportunity to publish their research rapidly in an open access medium that is freely available online to researchers worldwide. All manuscripts submitted to the journal are subject to rigorous peer review. Published material may include electronic supplementary material, such as animations (e.g. graphical chemical structures) or data (e.g. spectra) that can be downloaded for a reader's use.

The Journal of Cheminformatics aims to work closely with operators of open data repositories such as PubChem. Requests for collaboration are welcome; please contact the Editorial Office.

Content overview

Journal of Cheminformatics considers the following types of articles:

• Research: primary research from any area of chemistry, or chemistry related/interdisciplinary area.
• Database articles: describing a new database or a substantial improvement of an existing database (for example by an expansion of data to broaden the range of users, or by a major increase in functionality).
• Methodology articles: presenting 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.
• Software articles: describing the source code for software applications, tools or algorithm implementations. Typically, an archive of the source code of the current version of the software should be included with the submitted manuscript as a supplementary file.
• Commentary articles: 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. Editorial Board members may write such articles to highlight hot or emerging areas of research within a given field.

Peer review policies

The Journal of Cheminformatics is supported by an international Editorial Board.

All articles will be subject to in-house screening, following this the Editor(s)-in-Chief will assign the article to up to 4 referees. We make every effort to reach decisions within 5 weeks of submission. If the referees have requested revisions, in general, only two revised versions will be considered for further peer-review.

All peer review is closed - authors are not given the names of the referees of their article. In the event that the referees do not agree, the final decision will be taken by the Editor(s)-in-Chief with the advice of the Editorial Board.

Editorial Board members and referees are asked to declare any competing interests they may have in reviewing a manuscript.

On occasion, authors of rejected articles will be offered the opportunity to submit their research article to one of the other journals published by Chemistry Central and BioMed Central. Where relevant, the referee reports will be passed on to the second journal, which may expedite the peer review process. Referee reports are not passed on to any journal outside of BioMed Central.

If an author is not satisfied with the decision made on their manuscript, they are welcome to contact the Editorial Office with their appeal. A second opinion on the manuscript will be sought where appropriate.

Edited by Christoph Steinbeck and David J. Wild, Journal of Cheminformatics is supported by an expert Editorial Board.

Publishing in Journal of Cheminformatics

Articles in Journal of Cheminformatics 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 Cheminf 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

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

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Journal of Cheminformatics, 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 Cheminformatics 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 Cheminformatics is published by Chemistry Central Ltd, in association with 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 Cheminformatics however, has taken this further by making all its content open access.

Journal of Cheminformatics's articles are archived 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 Cheminformatics 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.