About Immunity & Ageing

What is Immunity & Ageing?

Immunity & Ageing is an Open Access, peer-reviewed, online journal that considers manuscripts on all aspects of ageing examined from an immunological point of view.

During the past century, mankind has gained more years of average life expectancy than in the last 10,000 years. More than 20% of the Western population is over 60 years of age, and the proportion of those over 85 is growing six times faster than the population as a whole. Over the last few years, journals oriented towards gerontology and geriatric sciences have been accepting an increasing number of articles dealing with immunology of ageing, but a specialised journal in this area does not exist. Immunity & Ageing will be an opportunity to focus on this topic, which is emerging as one of the critical mechanisms in ageing.

Content overview

Immunity & Ageing considers the following types of articles:

• Research - reports of data from original research.
• Book reviews - short summaries of the strengths and weaknesses of a book; they should evaluate its overall usefulness to the intended audience.
• Commentaries - short, focused and opinionated articles on any subject within the journal's scope. These articles are usually related to a contemporary issue, such as recent research findings, and are often written by opinion leaders invited by the Editorial Board.
• Debate articles - present an argument that is not essentially based on practical research. Debate articles can report on all aspects of the subject including sociological and ethical aspects.
• Hypotheses - short articles presenting an untested original hypothesis backed solely by previously published results rather than any new evidence.
• Methodology articles - present a new experimental method, test or procedure. The method described may either be completely new, or may offer a better version of an existing method. The article must describe a demonstrable advance on what is currently available.
• Reviews - comprehensive, authoritative descriptions of any subject within the scope of the journal. These articles are usually written by opinion leaders, invited by the Editorial Board.
• Short reports - describe proposed or ongoing research, providing a detailed account of the hypothesis, rationale, and methodology of the study.

Peer review policies

Manuscripts submitted to Immunity & Ageing will be assigned to the appropriate Section Editor by the Managing Editor. The Section Editor will oversee peer review of the manuscript. First, s/he will invite two external referees to review the manuscript. Based on the referees' comments s/he will then advise the Editor-in-Chief (or Deputy Editor) to reject the manuscript, request revisions to the manuscript according to the referees´ suggestions, or accept the manuscript without revision. The Section Editor will consider the referees' comments and ascertain whether the revised manuscript is suitable for publication, s/he will then advise the Editor-in-Chief (or the Deputy Editor) to accept or reject the manuscript. The reviewing process will be completed within 2-3 weeks.

Edited by Calogero Caruso, Immunity & Ageing is supported by an international Editorial Board.

Publishing in Immunity & Ageing

All articles will be listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and will be covered by PubMed Central, CAS and Scopus.

Articles in Immunity & Ageing should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. However, because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number.

The following citation:

Immun Ageing 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Immunity & Ageing does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Immunity & Ageing, why not register to receive alerts? Registration also enables you to customise your subject areas of interest, store your searches, and submit your manuscripts.

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to Immunity & Ageing using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Immunity & Ageing is published  by BioMed Central, an independent publisher committed to ensuring peer-reviewed biomedical research is Open Access. That means it is freely and universally accessible online, it is archived in at least one internationally recognised free access repository, and its authors retain copyright, allowing anyone to reproduce or disseminate articles, according to the BioMed Central copyright and licence agreement. Immunity & Ageing however, has taken this further by making all its content Open Access.

Immunity & Ageing's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also in repositories at the University of Potsdam in Germany, at INIST in France and in e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands' digital archive of all electronic publications. The journal is also participating in the British Library's e-journals pilot project, and plans to deposit copies of all articles with the British Library.

BioMed Central is working closely with the Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in Immunity & Ageing will be available.

Immunity & Ageing is able to deliver summaries of frequently updated content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. These are accessible via the orange "XML" button at the top of the list of recent articles or the list of most accessed articles. For more information about RSS feeds see our publisher's website.

For further information about general policies please see the instructions for authors.