BMC Rheumatology considers research on all aspects of the prevention, treatment and management of rheumatological diseases, and will place a special emphasis on systemic and inflammatory conditions and connective tissue diseases, along with related comorbidities. The Journal will publish a variety of article types, including Research articles, Case reports, Debates and Database articles, as well as Study protocols for proposed or on-going prospective clinical research.
BMC Rheumatology will complement and expand the open access journal portfolio within the area of rheumatology at BioMed Central and will be a sister journal to BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders within the BMC Series. Although there is some overlap in scope, BMC Rheumatology and BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders sit very comfortably alongside each other: BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders has a focus on studies with a definite musculoskeletal component (i.e. bone, cartilage, tendon etc.), whereas BMC Rheumatology will cover all areas of rheumatology, including systemic conditions and related comorbidities, which are topics that fall outside the scope of BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders.
As part of the BMC Series, which is a collection of high-quality, peer-reviewed journals covering all areas of biology and medicine and focusing on the needs of the research communities which they serve, the Journal does not make editorial decisions on the basis of the interest of a study or its likely impact; however, studies must be scientifically valid. For research articles this includes a scientifically sound research question, the use of suitable methods and analysis, and following community-agreed standards relevant to the research field.
BMC Rheumatology has three editorial sections:
We are delighted to welcome Susan Goodman, Edward Roddy and Alessia Alunno as Section Editors for the Journal, along with an expanding international team of Associate Editors [3]. Together with the in-house Editor, they will provide academic leadership and expertise. As the Journal grows and develops, we will continue to recruit academic editors to the Editorial Board in order to adapt to the changing and growing nature of the field.
In order to ensure the transparency and fairness of the review process and to give credit to reviewers for their efforts, BMC Rheumatology, like all of the medical journals in the BMC Series, operates an open peer review system. Open peer review means that the identity of the peer reviewers is disclosed and their names are included on the peer review reports, so that authors can see who has reviewed their manuscript. Once the article has been published, the reviewer reports throughout the peer review process and corresponding author responses are made available online along with the final version of the manuscript. The online published article will provide a link to its ‘pre-publication history’, which lists all of the versions of the manuscript, all the signed reviews, and all responses to the reviewers from the submission of the manuscript to its publication.
BMC Rheumatology aims to publish work deemed by peer reviewers to be a coherent and valid addition to scientific knowledge, and to provide an all-important open access platform to allow the effective dissemination of this knowledge, so that we can all work together to understand more fully and explore the most important developments, trends, and practices in rheumatological diseases and their associated comorbidities. We believe that open access and the Creative Commons Attribution License [4] is essential in this, allowing universal and free access to all articles published in the Journal and allowing them to be read and the data re-used without any restrictions. BMC Rheumatology will work closely with the other journals in the BMC Series portfolio [5] to help authors find the right home for their research in the field of rheumatology.