Aims and scope

Open Biology is a Royal Society online journal that welcomes original, high impact research in cell and developmental biology, molecular and structural biology, biochemistry, neuroscience, immunology, microbiology and genetics.

Articles submitted to Open Biology benefit from its broad scope and readership and dedicated media promotion and we also aim for a turnaround time of 4 weeks from submission to first decision.

Article types

Open Biology publishes research articles, reviews, methods and techniques articles, invited perspectives, invited commentaries, comments and invited replies.

Editorial board

Open Biology is overseen by a team of Subject Editors with support from an international Editorial Board with expertise across the scope of the journal.

Open access

All papers are made freely available under an open access model immediately on publication on the Open Biology website, and are deposited in PubMed Central on behalf of the author. Under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC by 4.0), authors retain copyright for their article, but allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles provided the original authors and source are cited.

Abstracting and indexing

Open Biology is indexed in PubMed, PubMed Central, Web of Science, Scopus and DOAJ, as well as many other indexes.

Journal metrics

The range of models used to measure the impact of journals and articles is constantly increasing, though most are based on the level of citations. As a signatory to DORA, the Royal Society offers a variety of journal and article-based metrics. We are also a member of the Initiative for Open Citations (i4OC) which is a multi-stakeholder project to make scholarly citation data openly available to enable the creation of new and better metrics.

Impact Factor

2021 Journal Citation Reports (JCR) (Clarivate Analytics)

Scopus metrics

2021 rankings