STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced the publication of Bioscience Hypotheses, a new journal for radical hypotheses on topics throughout the life sciences. The journal seeks to stimulate innovation by choosing work that is interesting and challenging, and provides a clear and coherent argument with a testable conclusion. Dr William Bains, biotechnology entrepreneur and innovator, and visiting lecturer at the University of Cambridge, serves as editor.
The journal welcomes papers that deliver new insight into the understanding or application of biology that could be of interest to a wide life science readership; are clear, coherent, and lay out an argument that is easy to follow; are not incompatible with known fact (although they may contest the interpretation of those facts); and provide an interpretation, hypothesis or solution that is testable. Papers that provide some preliminary data (itself perhaps not sufficiently robust to be published as an independent paper, but nevertheless rigorously collected) are also welcomed. However, preliminary data are not a requirement for publication, and Bioscience Hypotheses is not a forum for new experimental results unless they are supporting a broader theoretical structure.
Papers are not subject to standard peer review, but are selected by the Editor on the basis of the criteria laid out above. The journal explicitly does not publish papers addressing medical issues, which should continue to be directed to the sister journal Medical Hypotheses.
