Acceptance Criteria

Acceptance of a submission to TCB should be based on positive answers to all four of the following questions.

Are the claims made in the submission supported by accurate, convincing and clear evidence?

This is the most fundamental criterion. Reviewers should assess the technical soundness of the work, the clarity of the narrative, and the strength of the evidence provided.

Any gap between claims and evidence must be addressed by the authors. Often this will require additional experiments or analyses, but authors may alternatively choose to adjust (reduce) their claims to match the available evidence.

Does the submission make a novel contribution to computational biology?

TCB requires novelty. A submission must advance the state of the art—whether through a new algorithm, a new analysis methodology, a new biological insight enabled by computation, a new software tool, or a novel application of existing computational methods to an unstudied biological problem. Incremental variations of existing methods without meaningful biological or computational insight are not sufficient.

Reviewers should assess novelty relative to the existing literature. Reproducing prior results without substantial new contributions—computational, methodological, or biological—does not satisfy this criterion.

Does the submission include openly available source code?

TCB requires that all submissions include source code sufficient to reproduce the key results of the paper. Code must be made publicly accessible (e.g., via a public repository such as GitHub or Zenodo) upon acceptance. During the review process, code may be provided in anonymized or supplementary form. Reviewers are expected to check that the submitted code is reasonably complete and can, in principle, reproduce the claimed results.

Papers that describe purely theoretical contributions without any computational experiments are exempt from this requirement, but this exemption must be explicitly justified.

Would some individuals in TCB's audience be interested in the findings of this paper?

This criterion should be interpreted broadly. TCB's audience includes computational biologists, bioinformaticians, and biologists who use computational tools. If a subset of this audience would benefit from reading the paper, this criterion is satisfied. Reviewers who are uncertain should assume the criterion is met.

This criterion should not be used to reject work simply because it is narrowly focused or addresses a niche biological problem. Depth and specificity in computational biology are virtues.