About Automated Experimentation

What is Automated Experimentation?

Automated Experimentation is an open access journal that encompasses high-quality research on all aspects of the automation of clusters of experiments for high throughput, particularly (but not exclusively) in the fields of biomedicine and biomedical informatics.

Automated Experimentation aims to provide a platform for biomedical and informatics researchers to develop, execute, reuse, share, revise, and recombine their automated experimentation processes or protocols. There is no substitute for scientific experimentation in discovering new reliable knowledge however experimentation is highly expensive. Therefore it is desirable to automate the execution of a cluster of experiments according to pre-specified computational protocols. With recent and ongoing developments in engineering (e.g. Labs-on-a-chip), laboratory robotics, and informatics, automated experimentation is crucial for expediting large-scale research like systems biology and translational medicine.

Automated Experimentation features the methodology, protocols, and significant results of automated experiments for easy sharing among laboratories worldwide.

Automated Experimentation covers all fields that are related to high-throughput and automated experimentation. Topical areas include (but are not limited to):

• Use of experiment protocols and scientific workflows
• Representing experiment protocols, apparatus and data in domain-specific languages
• Verification and validation methods
• Instrument, apparatus or robotic setups
• Robot scientists and intelligent experimentation systems
• Web-based and computational experimentation
• Software for automating the experiment process
• Biomedical and clinical experimentation
• Scientific findings obtained by automated experiments
• Knowledge sharing infrastructures applied to experimentation
• eScience and eResearch
• Philosophy, theories and formalisms
• Methods of hypothesis generation
• Capturing the process of arguments in automated experiments

Content overview

Automated Experimentation considers the following types of articles:

• Research: reports of data from original research.
• Reviews: comprehensive, authoritative, descriptions of any subject within the scope of the journal. These articles are usually written by experts in the field, who have been invited by the Editorial Board.
• Commentaries: short, focused and opinionated articles on any subject within the scope of the journal. These articles are usually related to a contemporary issue, such as recent research findings, and are often written by opinion leaders.
• 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.
• Software articles: describe the source code for software applications, tools or algorithm implementations. Typically, an archive of the source code of the current version of the software should be included with the submitted manuscript as a supplementary file.

Peer review policy

Automated Experimentation will operate a 'closed' peer review system. Manuscripts submitted to the journal will be reviewed by at least two experts selected by the Editors-in-Chief, with the aim of reaching a decision as soon as possible. Reviewers will be required to declare any competing interests.

Edited by Siu-wai Leung, David Robertson and Dietlind Gerloff, Automated Experimentation is supported by an expert Editorial Board.

Publishing in Automated Experimentation

All articles are listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and are covered by PubMed Central.

Articles in Automated Experimentation 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:

Autom Exp 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Automated Experimentation does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Automated Experimentation, 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 Automated Experimentation using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Automated Experimentation 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. Automated Experimentation however, has taken this further by making all its content open access.

Automated Experimentation's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also 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.

Automated Experimentation 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.