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About Neural Development

Aims and scope | Open access | Article-processing charges | Indexing services | Publication and peer review process | Editorial policies | Citing articles in Neural Development | Why publish your article in Neural Development?

This page includes information about the aims and scope of Neural Development, editorial policies, open access and article-processing charges, the peer review process and other information. For details of how to prepare and submit a manuscript through the online submission system, please see the instructions for authors.

Aims & scope

Neural Development is an open access, peer-reviewed, online journal that considers manuscripts on all aspects of research that use molecular, cellular, physiological or behavioural methods to provide novel insights into the mechanisms that underlie the formation of the nervous system, as well as its renewal and regeneration in adults.

Neural Development aims to discover how the nervous system arises and acquires the abilities to sense the world and control adaptive motor output. The field includes analysis of how progenitor cells form a nervous system during embryogenesis, and how the initially formed neural circuits are shaped by experience during early postnatal life, as well as renewal and regeneration in adults. Some studies use well-established, genetically accessible model systems, but valuable insights are also obtained from less traditional models that provide behavioral or evolutionary insights.

Open access

All articles published by Neural Development are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Further information about open access can be found here.

Authors of articles published in Neural Development are the copyright holders of their articles and have granted to any third party, in advance and in perpetuity, the right to use, reproduce or disseminate the article, according to the BioMed Central copyright and license agreement.

Article-processing charges

Open access publishing is not without costs. Neural Development therefore levies an article-processing charge of £1475/$2265/€1735 for each article accepted for publication. We routinely waive charges for authors from low-income countries. Generally, if the submitting author's institution is a Member the cost of the article-processing charge is covered by the membership, and no further charge is payable. In the case of authors whose institutions are Supporter Members, however, a discounted article-processing charge is payable by the author. For further details, see our article-processing charge page. A limited number of waivers for article-processing charges are also available at the editors' discretion, and authors wishing to apply for these waivers should contact the editors.

Indexing services

All articles published in Neural Development are included in PubMed, the most widely used biomedical bibliographic database service, which is run by the US National Library of Medicine. Other bibliographic databases that index articles published in Neural Development include:

  • CAS
  • Citebase
  • Google Scholar
  • Index Copernicus
  • MEDLINE
  • OAIster
  • PsycINFO
  • PubMed
  • PubMed Central
  • Science Citation Index
  • Science Citation Index Expanded
  • SCImago
  • Scirus
  • Scopus
  • SOCOLAR
  • Zetoc

The full text of all research articles is deposited in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and other digital archives including e-Depot (The Netherlands).

Neural Development is tracked by Thomson Reuters (ISI)and has an Impact Factor of 3.70.

Publication and peer review process

Criteria for publication

Neural Development considers the following types of articles:

  • Research articles: reports of data from original research. These articles will form the major content of the journal.
  • Reviews: comprehensive, authoritative, descriptions of any subject within the scope of the journal.
  • Methodology articles: 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. Methodology articles will only be accepted for publication if they represent a significant advance in the field.
  • Short reports: these articles are intended for brief reports of findings.
  • Meeting reports: short descriptions of a conference that an author has attended, which should focus on the key developments presented and discussed at the meeting. These articles are usually commissioned but reports and suggestions may also be submitted for the editors' consideration.

Peer-review policies

Manuscripts will be reviewed by internationally recognized experts in the field of neural development, selected in part from our Editorial Board. Reviews will be rapid and the suitability of a manuscript for publication will be assessed solely on criteria of scientific excellence. Final decisions will be made by the Editors-in-Chief.

Authors will be able to check the progress of their manuscript through the submission system at any time by logging into My Neural Development, a personalized section of the site.

Copyediting and proofs

All articles published in Neural Development are copyedited before publication of the final version.

Articles published in Neural Development are published immediately on acceptance in the form of a provisional PDF. Copyedited and fully formatted PDF and full-text (HTML) versions are made available shortly after that.

Edited versions will be sent by email and corrections should be returned within two working days. Please provide a typed list of corrections clearly indicating where the corrections should be made and please send this list by email.

The editing is designed only to correct such things as misused words, spelling errors, missing references or incomplete citation information.

Reprints

High-quality, bound reprints can be purchased for all articles published. Please see our reprints website for further information about ordering reprints.

Supplements

Neural Development will consider supplements based on proceedings (full articles or meeting abstracts), reviews or research. All articles submitted for publication in supplements are subject to peer review. Published supplements are fully searchable and freely accessible online and can also be produced in print. All full length articles (proceedings, reviews or research articles) are indexed by PubMed. PubMed displays the title of the supplement only in the case of meeting abstract collections. For further information, please contact us.

Editorial policies

All manuscripts submitted to Neural Development should adhere to BioMed Central's editorial policies.

Citing articles in Neural Development

Articles in Neural Development should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. Because articles are not printed, they do not have page numbers; instead, they are given a unique article number.

Article citations follow this format:

Authors: Title. Neural Dev [year], [volume number]:[article number].

e.g. Roberts LD, Hassall DG, Winegar DA, Haselden JN, Nicholls AW, Griffin JL: Increased hepatic oxidative metabolism distinguishes the action of Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor delta from Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor gamma in the Ob/Ob mouse. Neural Dev 2009, 1:115.

refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Why publish your article in Neural Development?

High visibility

Neural Development's open access policy allows maximum visibility of articles published in the journal as they are available to a wide, global audience. Articles that have been especially highly accessed are highlighted with a 'Highly accessed' graphic, which appears on the journal's contents pages and search results.

Speed of publication

Neural Development offers a fast publication schedule whilst maintaining rigorous peer review; all articles must be submitted online, and peer review is managed fully electronically (articles are distributed in PDF form, which is automatically generated from the submitted files). Articles are published with their final citation immediately upon acceptance in a provisional PDF form. The article will subsequently be published in both fully browsable web form, and as a formatted PDF; the article will then be available through Neural Development, BioMed Central and PubMed Central and will also be included in PubMed.

Flexibility

Online publication in Neural Development gives authors the opportunity to publish large datasets, large numbers of color illustrations and moving pictures, to display data in a form that can be read directly by other software packages so as to allow readers to manipulate the data for themselves, and to create all relevant links (for example, to PubMed, to sequence and other databases, and to other papers).

Promotion and press coverage

Articles published in Neural Development are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be included in abstract books mailed to academics and are highlighted on Neural Development's pages and on the BioMed Central homepage.

In addition, articles published in Neural Development may be promoted by press releases to the general or scientific press. These activities increase the exposure and number of accesses for articles published in Neural Development. A list of articles recently press-released by journals published by BioMed Central is available here.

Authors of articles published in Neural Development retain the copyright of their articles and are free to reproduce and disseminate their work (for further details, see the BioMed Central copyright and license agreement).

For further information about the advantages of publishing in a journal from BioMed Central, please click here.