GENERAL EDITORIAL POLICIES

Mission and The Review Process

Biomicrofluidics (BMF) is an online open-access journal published by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) to rapidly disseminate novel microfluidic techniques with diagnostic, medical, biological, pharmaceutical, environmental, and chemical applications. Rapid turnaround, multimedia capability, and wide circulation among academic, national, and industrial laboratories are the main features offered by the journal. The Editor, aided by the interdisciplinary and international Editorial Board, is responsible for the content and other editorial matters related to the Journal. Manuscripts deemed appropriate for publication in BMF by the Editor are sent to an expert referee for evaluation, and may be sent to another referee for a second review. It is our intention to reach a decision on the disposition of a paper on the basis of no more than two rounds of reviewing. Only for exceptional situations will an additional review be undertaken.

An author may appeal an editor's decision to reject a manuscript by making a request to the Editor that the case be reviewed by the Executive Director of AIP. The Executive Director will not make direct decisions whether or not a paper should be accepted for publication, but rather will assess whether procedures were followed properly. Additional rounds of review or adjudication would only be called for if proper procedures were not followed.

Criteria for Publication

Papers are accepted for publication in BMF according to the following criteria:

Content: The mission of BMF is to offer prompt multimedia and electronic publication of microfluidic research with biological, medical, or chemical applications. Video clips demonstrating the basic concept or the performance of new microfluidic techniques are encouraged. All publications, including multimedia contents, will be archived by AIP. To be acceptable for publication in BMF, the submission should be original and interesting to the general microfluidics community or to the medical, life-science or environmental communities with interest in microfluidic applications.

Novelty: Emphasizing rapid dissemination of key data and novel techniques, BMF only publishes papers containing new techniques or experimental results that have not been submitted elsewhere. Manuscripts that, in the reviewers' or the Editor's opinion, fall short of this standard will not be accepted.

Readability: Manuscripts must be written in correct English. This is the responsibility of the authors, not the Editor or the reviewers. Papers that are judged to be not up to the standards will not be accepted.

Length: Brief Communications should contain no more than 2000 words of text (approximately 3 published pages), reduced, however, by allowances for equations, tables, and figures. An average one-column figure with its caption will displace about 220 words of text. Authors are cautioned that discovery of excess length might not occur until a late stage in publication and would then result in delay and expense. Circumvention of the length limitation by division of a long article into small parts is considered to be contrary to the purpose of this section. Whilst there are no strict length limitations for the other articles, Perspectives and Review Articles should be no longer than 50 published pages (approximately 35,000 words of text including allowances for equations, tables, and figures) and Regular Articles should not exceed 15 published pages (approximately 10,000 words of text including allowances for equations, tables, and figures). Manuscripts deemed to be too long or to require excessive time for reviews will not be accepted.

Format: Information for Contributors is available here.

Bylines: It is the responsibility of the person submitting the paper to ensure that all authors approve the inclusion of their names on the byline. In addition, whenever the name of a coauthor is removed from, or added to, the byline of a paper after the date of submission, we must have a signed concurrence of that coauthor before publication.

Copyright: Biomicrofluidics requests a signed copyright-transfer form, assigning the copyright of the paper and its multimedia content to the American Institute of Physics, to be included with each submission. Submission to BMF implies that the work has neither been copyrighted, classified, published, nor is it being considered for publication elsewhere. Since this form is required before publication, supplying it initially can prevent unnecessary delays. The copyright-transfer form and other useful information for authors can be found here.

Submission of manuscripts that contain patentable ideas is at the author's risk, and neither BMF nor the American Institute of Physics assumes any responsibility in this regard.

Editors
(April 2009)