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About Gut Pathogens

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

This page includes information about the aims and scope of Gut Pathogens, 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

Gut Pathogens encompasses all aspects of the biology and pathogenesis of bacterial, parasitic and viral infections of the gut, including their diagnosis and clinical management.

Gut Pathogens, the official journal of The International Society for Genomic and Evolutionary Microbiology (ISOGEM), is an open access, peer-reviewed online journal encompassing all aspects of the biology and pathogenesis of bacterial, parasitic and viral infections of the gut, including their diagnosis and clinical management.

Topical areas include, but are not limited to:

  • Microbial etiology of gut ailments
  • Gut invasion mechanisms
  • Microbial toxins and virulence factors in infections of the gut and associated glands - liver, pancreas
  • Bacterial adaptation to gut niches and evolution of pathogenicity
  • Biology and ecology of gut commensals and microbiota in health and disease
  • Biology and ecology of probiotic organisms
  • Host susceptibility or resistance to gut pathogens
  • Immune mechanisms of gut infections
  • Etiology of inflammatory bowel diseases
  • Molecular and serological diagnosis
  • Treatment and drug resistance mechanisms
  • Molecular epidemiology, transmission dynamics and evolutionary genetics
  • Vaccines for gut pathogens
  • Comparative and veterinary infectious diseases of the gut

Gut Pathogens aims to provide a much-needed open access home for high-quality research in this area.

Open access

All articles published by Gut Pathogens 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 Gut Pathogens 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. Gut Pathogens therefore levies an article-processing charge of £1290/$1950/€1510 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 Gut Pathogens 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 Gut Pathogens include:

  • CAS
  • Citebase
  • Google Scholar
  • Index Copernicus
  • Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition
  • OAIster
  • PubMed
  • PubMed Central
  • Science Citation Index Expanded
  • 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).

Gut Pathogens is tracked by Thomson Reuters (ISI)and has an Impact Factor of 2.11.

Publication and peer review process

Content overview

Gut Pathogens considers the following types of article:

  • Research articles: reports of data from original research.
  • Reviews: comprehensive, authoritative, descriptions of any subject within the scope of the journal.
  • Case reports: describe a major healthcare intervention, usually from a public health perspective. Case report articles that include a rigorous assessment of the processes and impact of the intervention as well as recommendations for future interventions will be considered favourably. Note that Case report articles should not describe an individual patient - authors should use the case report format for such descriptions.
  • Commentaries: short, focused and opinionated articles on any subject within the journal's scope. These articles focus on specific issues and are about 800 words.
  • Hypotheses: short articles presenting an untested original hypothesis backed solely by previously published results rather than any new evidence. They should outline significant progress in thinking that would also be testable, and be about 1500 words.
  • Letters to the Editor: these can take three forms: a substantial re-analysis of a previously published article, or a substantial response to such a re-analysis from the authors of the original publication, or an article that may not cover 'standard research' but that may be relevant to readers.
  • Short reports: brief reports of data from original research, usually about 1500 words.

Peer-review policies

Gut Pathogensoperates a closed peer-review policy. Manuscripts submitted to Gut Pathogens will be examined by the Editor-in-Chief before being sent for peer review. Manuscripts will be sent to two reviewers, one of which may be a member of the Gut Pathogens Editorial Board with specialist knowledge in the area of the submitted manuscript. If conflicting recommendations arise from the peer-review, the manuscript will be sent for further review. Statisticians will be consulted where needed, and final decisions will be made by the Editor-in-Chief with consultation of the Editorial Board.

Edited by Niyaz Ahmed, Francis Megraud and Leonardo Sechi, Gut Pathogens is supported by an expert Editorial Board.

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

Reprints

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

Supplements

Gut Pathogens 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 Gut Pathogens should adhere to BioMed Central's editorial policies.

Citing articles in Gut Pathogens

Articles in Gut Pathogens 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. Gut Pathog [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. Gut Pathog 2009, 1:115.

refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Why publish your article in Gut Pathogens?

High visibility

Gut Pathogens'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

Gut Pathogens 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 Gut Pathogens, BioMed Central and PubMed Central and will also be included in PubMed.

Flexibility

Online publication in Gut Pathogens 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 Gut Pathogens are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be included in abstract books mailed to academics and are highlighted on Gut Pathogens's pages and on the BioMed Central homepage.

In addition, articles published in Gut Pathogens 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 Gut Pathogens. A list of articles recently press-released by journals published by BioMed Central is available here.

Authors of articles published in Gut Pathogens 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.