About the Journal

Bioenergetics Communications (BEC) is a journal focused on the field of mitochondrial and chloroplast bioenergetics and physiology. 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

For information on publications formats and submission, please see: Submissions

BEC is an Open Access Journal, with open and published peer-review, and follows the concept of living communications.

Bioenergetics Communications is an initiative of the Oroboros team in collaboration with the MitoEAGLE network. As innovators, we seek solutions to current challenges in the pandemic COVID-19 crisis, the present economic crisis, and the more persistent reproducibility crisis. Our main expertise is in the field of biomedical research, but our responsibility extends to addressing the climate crisis and international communication.

  • The presently funded H2020 NextGen-O2k project of Oroboros Instruments supports the launch of Bioenergetics Communications.
  • Responsible research and its communication are required now more than ever. In response to the global economic crisis, research will be forced to focus on saving resources and increasing efficiency. Irreproducibility represents a terrible waste of resources and inefficiency at large. Oroboros Instruments has a long-term commitment towards reproducibility and economy.
  • The noncommunicable epidemic of diabesity and mitObesity is enhanced during COVID-19 induced quarantine and restricted mobility. Not only more high-quality research is needed to learn more about mitObesity, but what we know has to be communicated more effectively and generally.
  • Quality control of instrumental performance ensures accuracy of measurements and reproducibility across laboratories. Bioenergetics Communications provides a platform to harmonize and share interlaboratory results as Open Science communication - Gentle Science.

COVID-19 accelerated the acute need for unrestricted Open Access and fast publication by using preprints for rapid communication (Kupferschmidt 2020). The pre-print culture addresses several key elements of the present challenges, yet remains incomplete without a novel re-print culture of scientific communication adapted to the current research opportunities and resources of the global ecosystem. Many valuable studies are prevented from timely publication in traditional journals. Bioenergetics Communications is the new journal that fills the gap in today's niche of scientific communication.

  • Many research teams and PhD students are blocked and face experimental programs lacking statistical completion. - These studies can be shared now as a preprint and immediately be submitted for peer-review and publication in Bioenerg Commun (footnote 1). We consider Bayesian statistics and the concept, that few findings reported by many independent groups are statistically more powerful than findings repeated many times by one group only.
  • Many scientists store experimental data that are methodologically sound - as judged by consistent technical repeats - but lack sufficient numbers of independent replica for conventional publication, or which are dismissed as negative results. - These data can be shared now in a preprint and immediately be submitted for peer-review and publication in Bioenerg Commun (footnote 2).
  • Many reviewers and editors ask for additional experiments or entirely new studies, without which a manuscript is flatly rejected. - Bioenerg Commun does not accept peer reviews that demand additional experiments; reviewers are asked to comment exclusively on the content of a manuscript submitted for publication. Cooperative reviewers may offer to contribute their own additional results and join as coauthors.
  • Many journals request excessive publication fees for Open Access and page charges. Publication in Bioenerg Commun is free of charge at this time of restricted financial resources, such that corresponding funds will not be diverted away from productive research. Today the scientific community has sufficiently sophisticated opportunities to disseminate on-line publications effectively and free of charge. This allows authors to play key roles as conductors of research instead of playing a role as actors confined to the journal playwright's script.

Footnotes

  1. ".. real management is mostly about managing coalitions, maintaining support for a project so it doesn’t evaporate". - (Silver 2012)
  2. ".. the negative findings are probably kept in a file drawer rather than being published (about 90 percent of the papers published in academic journals today document positive findings rather than negative ones.) However, that does not mask the problem of false positives in the findings that do make it to publication". - (Silver 2012)

Living Communications

  • Bioenergetics Communications is a preprint-linked journal: Rapid dissemination is possible before peer-review in MitoFit Preprint Archives. 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

» BEC2020.1: Mitochondrial physiology - Open Access

Gentle Science

  • Bioenergetics Communications is the Oroboros Ecosystem journal primarily intended to publish and disseminate rapidly 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, yet considering precautions against irreproducible 'waste science'.
  • Protocols have 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 a lot of time for all who work along the same lines of research and may encourage collaborations to solve the issue.
  • Contributions are invited on very specific methodological details with preliminary examples of applications, sharing information rapidly rather than adding it much later to the supplementary material of extended research papers.

 

Open Access and BEC perspectives

 All communications in BEC are Open Access (OA)

  • Budget
  1. Initially supported by the H2020 NextGen-O2k project. How can BEC be sustainably financed, when neither author fees (page charges) nor user fees (Open Access) add to be budget? Financial aspects are not disclosed during the review process, to guarantee an unbiased review.
  2. If financial support by grants is cited, a grant dissemination fee is charged.
  3. If institutional support is available and cited, an institutional dissemination fee is charged.
  4. If author affiliations include for-profit companies, a company dissemination fee is charged.
  5. Support by conferences publishing their abstracts or proceedings.
  6. Charged announcements (conferences; companies).
  7. General institutional financial support (?).
  • MiPsociety
  • The consortium of the COST Action MitoEAGLE is immediately involved in establishing BEC. However, COST does not finance salaries.
  • Beyond MitoEAGLE, which is in its final fourth year, the Mitochondrial Physiology Society should discuss, if BEC may be supported as the official journal of the MiPsociey.

 

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 made readily 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.
DOI for different versions: doi10.26124/bec:2020-0001.v1 | doi10.26124/bec:2020-0001.v2
File names: BEC_2020.1_doi10.26124bec2020-0001.v1.pdf | BEC_2021.24_doi10.26124bec2020-0001.v2.pdf