Journal of Biology

The Journal of Biology (JBiol) was a scientific journal published by BioMed Central. It was launched in 2002 with the aim to provide an open-access alternative to the Top-tier Biology journals Nature, Science and Cell. Because of stringent selection criteria, it published only a few research articles per year, in 2007, for instance, only four, with the rest being comment and short review articles.. Although many of JBiol research articles were highly cited, this was probably a main reason, why JBiol never reached the same recognition as its classic counterparts. JBiol was never indexed by Thomson/Reuters ISI web of knowledge, and therefore didn't get an official impact factor. According to an unofficial calculation in 2007, J Biol reached an impact factor of 20.1 (doi:10.1186/jbiol57).

After 8 years of publishing, and around 1yr after BioMed Central was taken over by Springer Journals, J. Biol. was discontinued in April 2010 by being amalgamated with the existing Biomed Central journal BMC Biology.