Publishing selected WABI papers in AMB

Burhard Morgenstern, Peter Stadler
Editors-in-Chief, AMB


For several years now, selected extended papers from WABI have been published as thematic series in Algorithms for Molecular Biology (AMB). The procedure is as follows:

* The WABI co-chairs act as guest editors for the series. To this end, they temporarily get the status of Associate Editors of the journal. That means, that they can handle submissions for the series, i.e. invite reviewers (if they want), and make final acceptance decisions. Each submission from WABI is assigned to one of the two guest editors.

* Before authors submit their WABI manuscripts to AMB, the co-chairs should send us a list of all selected papers, indicating which guest editor will handle which submission, so we can assign incoming submissions accordingly.

* In addition, submitting authors should indicate in their cover letter that their manuscripts are for the WABI series.

* The publisher, BMC, wants selected conference papers to be substantially extended, compared to previous versions in proceedings volumes, to avoid double publication issues. What ‘substantially extended’ exactly means is not formally defined. Usually, it involves additional proofs, additional benchmarking experiments, more detailed discussions etc., compared to the paper that was previously published in the proceedings volume. It is not possible to submit an exact copy of a proceedings paper to AMB.

* As with other OA journals, AMB authors have to pay an article processing charge (APC) which is currently €1,690 per publication (plus tax). However, if the corresponding author is from a BMC membership organisation, the APC may be partially or completely covered, see

  https://almob.biomedcentral.com/about

In addition, we have eight APC waivers per year available, i.e. we can publish eight papers from non-BMC member organisations for free. We use most of these waivers to support the WABI series. The guest editors should therefore inform us how many submissions from non-BMC membership organisations we have, so we can see if all of them can be covered by our annual APC waivers.

* Since WABI papers have already been reviewed by the WABI PC, it is often not necessary to review them again for the AMB series; guest editors can make acceptance decisions based on the WABI reviews and discussions alone. But it is possible to invite additional reviewers, e.g. if the guest editor handling the submission feels that there are issues that need to be addressed or simply wants to have more experts looking at the manuscript.

* In any case, BMC insists that for all publications, reviewer names and reports are recorded in the online submission system, to make sure that the reviewing process is properly documented. Thus, for those submissions for which the guest editors do not invite additional reviews, the reviewer reports from WABI should be uploaded to the AMB submission system instead. To this end, the PC members who reviewed the submission for WABI need to be technically invited as reviewers for AMB and, once they accept the invitation, their WABI reviews are uploaded and considered as reviews for the AMB submission.

* As other BMC and Springer Nature journals, AMB uses the Editorial Manager (EM) system for the submission and reviewing procedure. Guest editors not familiar with EM should contact us or the BMC staff for assistance.

* Papers from thematic series in AMB are not marked as such, neither in the TOC nor on the papers themselves. They look like regular papers, and there is only a link on the AMB web page to the series that have been published:

  https://almob.biomedcentral.com/

To make the WABI series better visible, it would be possible to publish all papers simultaneously, so they would appear together as one block, possibly together with an introductory editorial written by the guest editors. A disadvantage would be that, in this case, publication would be delayed until all papers of a series have been finally accepted. In previous years, the guest editors therefore decided to publish each paper immediately on acceptance. Both options are possible, and the guest editors should let us know which one they prefer.