About Journal of Autoimmune Diseases

What is Journal of Autoimmune Diseases?

Journal of Autoimmune Diseases is an Open Access, peer-reviewed, online journal that considers scientific reports in the field of autoimmunity.

Journal of Autoimmune Diseases aims to publish reports on clinical and experimental research in autoimmunity. The emphasis will be on studies relevant to treatment and prevention of autoimmune diseases, but basic research that helps our understanding of immune mechanisms that lead to a mistake in self-recognition will also be considered. The journal welcomes manuscripts in areas such as immunogenetics, immune cell signaling, molecular markers of autoimmune diseases, immune interventions, new animal models, transplantation, stem cell therapy, and gene therapy. In addition to high quality research with mostly positive data, the journal will also consider methodology articles, reviews, hypotheses and commentaries.

By launching Journal of Autoimmune Diseases with BioMed Central, we hope to circumvent some problems of traditional publishing. The first is a conflict between a rapidly growing body of research articles in autoimmunity and a slow and an expensive way of their handling by traditional journals. Online submission to Journal of Autoimmune Diseases will speed up peer review and, being online, manuscripts can be published as soon as they are accepted. "Open Access" to the content of the journal means that all the articles are freely accessible online, authors retain copyright, and all material is immediately available in PubMed and in PubMed Central. The second problem, the bias of peer reviewers due to personal or another attitude, will be reduced by our "double-blind" peer-review policy, when both the authors and the reviewers remain anonymous to each other.

Content overview

Journal of Autoimmune Diseases considers the following types of articles:

• Research - reports of data from original research.
• Commentaries - short, focused and opinionated articles on any subject within the scope of the journal. These articles are usually related to a contemporary issue, such as recent research findings.
• Methodology articles - these articles 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.
• Hypothesis articles - present an untested original hypothesis backed up solely by a survey of previously published results.
• Review articles - summaries of recent insights in specific research areas within the scope of Journal of Autoimmune Diseases.

Peer review policies

In our peer review process, not only the reviewers remain anonymous, but the authors too - that is a so-called "double-blind" peer review. This is an important feature of the Journal of Autoimmune Diseases. If a reviewer does not know the origin of a manuscript, his recommendation is based solely on the scientific merits of the paper. The Editorial Board will remove the authors' names and affiliations from the title page before the manuscript is sent to reviewers. It is the authors' responsibility to prevent disclosure through the text. Authors may also specify the reviewers they wish to exclude from the review process.

Edited by David D’Cruz, Journal of Autoimmune Diseases is supported by an international Editorial Board.

Publishing in Journal of Autoimmune Diseases

All articles will be listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and will be covered by PubMed Central, CAS and Embase.

Articles in Journal of Autoimmune Diseases 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 Autoimmune Dis 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

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

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Journal of Autoimmune Diseases, 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 Autoimmune Diseases 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 Autoimmune Diseases is published by BioMed Central, an independent publisher 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 Autoimmune Diseases however, has taken this further by making all its content Open Access.

Journal of Autoimmune Diseases's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also in repositories at the University of Potsdam in Germany, 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.

BioMed Central is working closely with the Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in Journal of Autoimmune Diseases will be available.

Journal of Autoimmune Diseases 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.