About Neural Development

What is Neural Development?

Neural Development is a peer-reviewed open access, online journal, which features studies that use molecular, cellular, physiological or behavioral methods to provide novel insights into the mechanisms that underlie the formation of the nervous system.

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. 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.

Neural Development offers the following special features:

• Personal cover pages: authors will be able to download and print a cover page for their article. This page will mimic the front cover of a traditional print journal; authors will be able to choose a figure from their manuscript or another relevant image to be used as the background on which the journal title, logo and article citation details will be overlaid.
• Embedded movies: readers will be able to watch movies within a figure box contained on the same page as the text of the article; this contrasts with other online journals where movies can only be played on an isolated page, separated from the main text.

Content overview

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.
• 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.

Edited by Bill Harris, Andrew Lumsden, Joshua Sanes and Rachel Wong, Neural Development is supported by an expert Editorial Board.

Publishing in Neural Development

All articles are listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and are covered by PubMed Central, MEDLINE, Thomson Reuters (ISI), CAS and Scopus.

Articles in Neural Development 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:

Neural Dev 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Neural Development does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Neural Development, 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 Neural Development using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Neural Development is published by 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. Neural Development however, has taken this further by making all its content open access.

Neural Development's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also 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.

Neural Development 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.