Louisa Flintoft

Here, in the next in our ‘How to get published’ series, Louisa Flintoft explains the importance of making a good first impression to maximize your manuscript’s chances of being sent for peer review. Louisa Flintoft 8 Feb 2016 First impressions are particularly important when submitting your manuscript Pixabay Journal editors are busy people.

Since our launch in 2000 as one of the first open access journals, Genome Biology has always had a strong enthusiasm for open research policies. For example, we were among the first to mandate publicly available supporting data and open source code. Naturally, then, we have watched with close interest as other journals have experimented with—or in some cases wholeheartedly embraced—open or transparent peer review.

Back in 2000, Genome Biology started to publish what were called ‘Deposited research articles’. These were papers that had been submitted to the journal but were still in the process of being peer reviewed, and this was a new concept for biologists: using the internet to give scientists access to research results before publication in a journal.