Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group has announced a new partnership with The Systems Biology Institute, Tokyo, to launch npj Systems Biology and Applications, an online open access journal dedicated to publishing high quality research. The journal will begin accepting submissions in November 2014 and publish its first articles on nature.com in Q1 2015.
npj Systems Biology and Applications was formally launched on September 15 at The International Conference on Systems Biology (ICSB) in Melbourne, Australia. The journal aims to provide a home for articles that help define the developing and interdisciplinary field of Systems Biology. The 15th ICSB attracts top system biologists from all over the world to an environment that encourages integration of biology, computer science, engineering and chemistry, and that spans leading areas of biomedical research. The Systems Biology Institute is a non-profit private research institution established in 2000 with the aim of promoting systems biology research and its application to medicine and global sustainability.
Areas of interest for the journal include fundamental biological systems and drug discovery, but also systems-based applications to healthcare, medical practice and implementation, big data, biotechnology, food science, human behaviour, broader biological systems and industrial applications of systems biology.
Dr Hiroaki Kitano will serve as the Editor in Chief of the journal. Dr. Kitano has played a pivotal role in establishing and promoting the discipline of systems biology, which employs modern computing to study living systems as an intergrated whole, and is now part of the research program at hundreds of universities and institutes around the world.
npj Systems Biology and Applications will encourage all approaches, including network biology, application of control theory to biological systems, computational modelling and analysis, comprehensive and/or high-content measurements, theoretical, analytical and computational studies of system-level properties of biological systems, ICT healthcare solutions, mobile devices, and computational/software/data platforms enabling such studies and applications. The journal will publish research articles and review articles, as well as editorial summaries.
Systems Biology is an interdisciplinary field and this is reflected in the broad audience of npj Systems Biology and Applications: researchers in basic biology and biomedicine, researchers and managers in the pharmaceutical, biotechnological and healthcare industries as well as policy-makers in the biomedical sciences.
