First year of open-access scientific journal publishing: our mishaps, our expectations, our plans for the bright future

Abstract

Whу did we create SBPReports?In silico methods have become a versatile and effective tool for studying natural phenomena at multiple levels. However, unlike economics and physics, biology and physiology have always been slightly reluctant to accept the novel systemic approaches. Since scientific articles are among the critical metrics for the modern scientific society, the number of scientific journals devoted to some topic can be an excellent marker to evaluate the impact on society. Indeed, there are esteemed journals, such as PLOS Computational Biology or Journal of Theoretical Biology. Still, they focus mainly on a common biological phenomenon, while questions of physiology and pathophysiology are often overlooked.On the other hand, the amount of work on computational biology is steadily growing, with ~12000 results published in 2010 and ~28000 in 2020 with the keyword "computational model", according to PubMed. With all this being said and our significant experience in the different aspects of computational physiology, our team has decided that it would be a mistake to lose an opportunity to cover this niche. Likewise, as a group of fellow scientists, at the end of 2019, we decided to create our venture and launch our scientific journal -Systems Biology and Physiology Reports (SBPReports) [1]. This publisher's note would be an attempt to underline our first hectic year of open access scientific publishing.