About the Journal

Bioenergetics Communications (BEC) is an Open Access Journal focused on bioenergetics and physiology of mitochondria, chloroplasts and microorganisms. BEC is linked to the MitoFit Preprints and follows the concept of living communications with peer-reviews published non-anonymously. As innovators, we seek solutions to current challenges facing the infodemic and reproducibility crisis.

BEC concept

Living Communications

• Bioenergetics Communications is a preprint-linked journal: Rapid dissemination and discussion by the scientific community is possible before peer-review with the submitted manuscript available open access as a preprint. This is followed by Open Peer Review, such that BEC provides a platform for publishing and sharing high-quality data.

• With Living Communications BEC takes the next step from pre-print to re-print. Living Communications allow additions and corrections of a publication with Open Peer Review, such that the publication can evolve with full traceability, instead of remaining a static outdated paper. Living Communications reduce the inflationary explosion in the numbers of daily published papers.

» Further details - Living Communications

Scope

BEC welcomes scientific contributions that provide a link to bioenergetics, mitochondrial or chloroplast physiology. Papers may aim at elucidating mechanisms in bioenergetics, from basic science to pathologies. Methodological papers that will help other scientists to further explore this field are also welcome, as well as conceptual or theoretical work that explore new areas linked to bioenergetics.

Submissions

Besides traditional innovative communications, BEC also encourages the submission of:

• Technical communications- containing instrumental and methodological details, particularly focused on quality control or novel applications
• Confirmatory results- demonstrating reproducibility (confirmation by independent groups is the only way to do this) and add to the statistical significance of published results
• Negative results- discussing findings on methodological difficulties that failed to lead to a relevant innovation
• Conceptual communications – discussions that focus on novel concepts in bioenergetics or propose harmonization of terms and concepts in the field
• Theoretical communications – theoretical work with novel concepts and perspectives or commentaries
• Case studies – single cases without statistics, provided there is a link to bioenergetics

» For information on formats and submission, please see: Manuscript types, Author guidelines and Submissions

Currently there are no publication fees for publishing in BEC.

Open Access

All communications in BEC are Open Access (OA)

Open Peer Review

BEC encourages an Open Peer Review format in which the reviewers’ comments are published with their names and with the authors’ reply.

» Further details – Review process

 

Support

Bioenergetics Communications is an initiative of the Oroboros team. The launch of BEC was funded by the H2020 NextGen-O2k project of Oroboros Instruments.

 Gentle Science

• Bioenergetics Communications encourages rapidly publishing technical reports on optimization and standardization of methods and protocols, to foster interlaboratory collaborations, and to combine and compare interlaboratory results. This rapid communication is part of the quality of science transfer, while considering precautions against irreproducible 'waste science'.

• Protocols need to be shared rapidly, thus enabling research groups to quickly test, harmonize and implement standardized procedures to obtain more reproducible and comparable results.

• It is particularly important to publish protocols that do not (yet) work. This saves time for all who work along the same lines of research and may encourage collaborations to solve the issue.

• Contributions are invited on methodological details with preliminary examples of applications, sharing information rapidly rather than adding it much later to the supplementary material of extended research papers.

DORA

• Bioenergetics Communications has signed DORA in support of developing and promoting best practices in the assessment of researchers and scholarly research.

 The Digital Object Identifier

• Contributions to Bioenergetics Communications are publications with a DOI number in the format:

doi:10.26124/bec:YYYY-####.v#

• After Open Peer Review, the publication will be available online, with a DOI.
• All versions have a specific DOI version number, such that each version remains Open Access and the discussion is added to the article page.
• For more information on the DOI assignment, see: MitoFit Preprints

 Mitochondrial Physiology Society

BEC is affiliated with the MiPsociety.

The consortium of the COST Action MitoEAGLE (2016 – 2021) was involved in establishing BEC.