TCB Guidelines for Authors

This document provides instructions for authors. Authors are required to also read and be familiar with the Editorial Policies, the Acceptance Criteria, the Ethics Guidelines, and the Code of Conduct.

Overview of the Submission Process

TCB uses a single-blind review process: reviewers are aware of the authors' identities, but author identities are not disclosed to the public until a decision has been made. Submissions do not need to be anonymized. All authors must have complete and active OpenReview profiles, including affiliations, conflicts of interest, and publication history. Authors must also provide information on appropriate action editors for the submission, as well as on human subjects reporting (IRB), funding, competing interests, and any relevant conflicts of interest.

Following submission, an action editor will be assigned and the paper will be evaluated to check that it meets the criteria for the review process (e.g., it should be in scope, include source code, and be complete). Then reviewers will be assigned to read and review the manuscript. An open-ended rebuttal, discussion, and revision phase will allow authors to interact with reviewers and update their paper. Finally, the action editor will enter a decision: either accept as is, accept with minor revisions, or reject. See the Submission Guidelines and Editorial Policies, as well as the Reviewer and Action Editor Guidelines, for more information.

Novelty Requirement

TCB requires that every submission make a clear novel contribution to computational biology. This can take many forms: a new algorithm, a new methodology, new biological insights enabled by computation, a new software tool, or a novel application of existing methods to an unstudied problem. Authors should clearly articulate the novel contribution of their work in the introduction.

TCB does not accept pure replication studies, incremental parameter searches, or papers whose sole contribution is applying an off-the-shelf method to a new dataset without methodological or biological insight. See the Acceptance Criteria for details.

Code Requirement

All submissions to TCB must include source code sufficient to reproduce the key results of the paper. This is a hard requirement and not merely a recommendation. During submission, code should be uploaded as supplementary material (as a ZIP archive or a link to a public repository). Upon acceptance, code must be made publicly accessible via a persistent public repository (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, or Zenodo).

The code should be sufficiently documented so that a competent reader could reproduce the main results without unreasonable effort. Reviewers will check that code is present and reasonably complete; detailed code review is not expected.

Papers that describe purely theoretical contributions with no computational experiments may apply for an exemption to the code requirement; such exemptions must be explicitly requested in the submission and justified.

Broader Impact Statement

If their work carries a significant risk of harm (e.g., potential dual-use concerns in synthetic biology, privacy risks from genomic data), authors are required to include a Statement of Broader Impact. The statement should include a concise, concrete description of potential positive and negative societal impact, as well as a discussion of possible mitigations. Please read the Ethics Guidelines for an in-depth discussion of risks and mitigating factors.

Format

Submissions may be any length, but a paper's length should be justified by its content. Submissions must be PDF files generated using the TCB LaTeX stylefile and template. The submission PDF may include an Appendix after the references (for proofs, derivations, or supplementary results). Reviewers may choose whether to read the Appendix.

Authors may submit up to 100 MB of supplementary material, including data, source code, or videos; all supplementary materials must be in PDF or ZIP format. Like the main submission, supplementary material need not be anonymized.

Copyright and Licensing

All TCB submissions, from the time of submission to final publication, are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Copyright is retained by the authors at all times. Authors are free to post their work to arXiv or other preprint servers at any time.