TCB

Submission Guidelines and Editorial Policies

Scope

TCB's objective is to publish original, novel papers that advance the understanding of biological systems through computational approaches. This includes contributions in algorithms, mathematical modeling, statistical methodology, machine learning applied to biology, and software tools, as well as computational analyses that provide new biological insight.

Areas in scope include (but are not limited to): sequence analysis, structural bioinformatics, systems biology, regulatory genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metagenomics, single-cell analysis, spatial biology, evolutionary computation, computational neuroscience, and the development of biological databases and benchmarks.

Papers that apply computational methods to biological problems outside this scope, or that are primarily experimental biology without a substantial computational contribution, may be desk rejected.

Novelty

TCB requires that every accepted paper make a novel contribution to the field of computational biology. This is a departure from venues that accept papers on the basis of correctness alone. The novel contribution may take any of the following forms:

Pure replications of prior work, incremental parameter sweeps, and straightforward applications of off-the-shelf methods to new datasets without methodological or biological insight are not considered novel and will not be accepted.

Code Requirement

All submissions to TCB must include source code sufficient to reproduce the key results of the paper. This is a mandatory requirement and not a recommendation.

Papers that describe purely theoretical contributions with no computational experiments may apply for an exemption. Such exemptions must be explicitly requested at submission time and will be evaluated by the assigned Action Editor.

Review Process

TCB uses a single-blind review process. Reviewers are aware of the authors' identities; authors do not know the identities of their reviewers. Submissions are therefore not required to be anonymized.

Upon submission, an Action Editor (AE) is assigned from TCB's editorial board. The AE first performs an initial check to ensure the submission is in scope, novel, includes code, and otherwise meets submission requirements. If appropriate, the submission is sent for review to three referees. After all reviews are submitted, an open-ended discussion and revision phase allows authors to respond to reviewers and update their manuscript. The AE then makes a final decision.

Evaluation Criteria

All submissions are evaluated on the following criteria. See the Acceptance Criteria page for full details.

  1. Are the claims made in the submission supported by accurate, convincing and clear evidence?
  2. Does the submission make a novel contribution to computational biology?
  3. Does the submission include openly available source code?
  4. Would at least some individuals in TCB's audience be interested in the findings of this paper?

Decisions

An AE may reach one of the following decisions:

Dual Submission Policy

TCB does not accept submissions that are currently under review at another peer-reviewed venue, or that have been published (or accepted for publication) in any archival venue with overlapping content. Posting a preprint to arXiv or another preprint server does not constitute prior publication and is permitted. Authors must disclose any substantially overlapping prior or concurrent work at the time of submission.

Submission Requirements

Certifications

TCB uses a certification system to highlight particularly noteworthy accepted papers. Certifications are awarded in the following categories:

Open Access

All accepted TCB papers are published open access. From the time of submission to final publication, all papers are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Copyright is retained by the authors at all times.

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