Nature Publishing Group is pleased to announce 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, which will be formally launched on 15th September at The International Conference on Systems Biology (ICSB) in Melbourne, Australia, 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.
Martin Delahunty, Global Head of Partnership Journals at Nature Publishing Group said: “We’re delighted to partner with The Systems Biology Institute on npj Systems Biology and Applications, the latest addition to our Nature Partner Journal portfolio. These open access, online-only journals disseminate high-quality, online-only subject specific research, demonstrating our continued commitment to open science.”
Dr Hiroaki 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.
Dr Hiroaki Kitano, Editor in Chief said: “Systems biology has now turned into mainstream biology. We all know biological systems from subcellular systems to global eco-systems are vastly complicated systems. At the same time, there are underlying principles to how such systems have formed, and are functioning. Uncovering such principles, relating them to tangible findings, applying them to medical, healthcare, biotechnology, and global sustainability is what has been expected from systems biology. I have been carefully watching the progress of this, and am convinced that we now have arrived at the stage to seriously boost the field. Nature Publishing Group is an ideal partner to bring the field into the next level.”
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.
