Welcome from the Journal of Applied Bioanalysis

Correspondence: Dr. Roland J.W. Meesters. Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Sciences, Universidad de los Andes, Cra. 1 No.18ª-10, Office Q-826, Bogotá D.C., Colombia. Phone: +57 1 3394949 Ext. 1479, Fax: + 57 1 3324366.

Citation:
Meesters RJ. Welcome from the Journal of Applied Bioanalysis. J Appl Bioanal 1(1), 1-2 (2015).

Open-access and Copyright: ©2015 Meesters RJ. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

Funding/Manuscript writing assistance: The author has no financial support or funding to report and also declares that no writing assistance was utilized in the production of this article.

Competing interest: The author has declared that no competing interest exists.

Article history: Received 19 October 2014, Revised 25 October 2014, Accepted 26 October 2014.

I am much honored to introduce the inaugural issue of the Journal of Applied Bioanalysis (JAB). JAB is a new peer-reviewed Open Access journal that is dedicated to the publication of scientific articles on any related aspect from the bioanalysis field in the broadest way of the word. The editorial board is still in the process of being formed, but it includes at this moment about twenty-one members. Present editorial board consists of experts from different areas such as scientists from the pharmaceutical industry, academia, enterprises and/or CROs.

JAB will start its publication frequency on a quarterly basis and with increasing manuscript submissions JAB’s publication frequency will be adjusted accordingly to bimonhtly or even monthly publication. JAB, is a gold open access journal that delivers essential scientific information in a concise and clear way using at-a-glance article formats providing today’s bioanalytical chemists with peer reviewed articles on recent developments and applications from the bioanalysis area. 

Topics of particular interest for publication are:

– Modern separation sciences and hyphenated techniques
– Biological sample preparation and (alternative) collection techniques for biological samples
– Data processing and evaluation, bioassay automation and/or miniaturization
– Mass spectrometric technologies and applications in bioanalysis
– Application of immunoassays and ligand-binding assays
– Bioanalytical guidelines and regulatory issues
– Instrumentation developments and improvements
– Microfluidics and Lab-on-Chip technologies
– Development and validation of bioassays in specific fields of bioanalysis such as;
– Drug metabolism studies, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics
– Clinical pharmacology, Therapeutic drug monitoring, clinical– and forensic toxicology
– Life sciences (“omics”-sciences), especially (pharmaco) metabolomics and proteomics
– Drugs-of-abuse and sports doping screening

JAB has a relatively broad scope and authors are invited to submit manuscripts documenting editorial, commentary, opinion, perspective, review, original research, conference report, rapid communication and letters-to-the-editor articles. The general journal audiences of JAB are scientists, technicians and managers from academia, industry and governmental institutions working or being interested in the bioanalysis area. Next to the publication of regularly journal issues, special theme issues on selected topics in collaboration with international experts from a particular bioanalysis are are foreseen.

I invite you kindly to contact the editorial office if you have a topic of high current interest, broad enough to attract a reasonable reader audience, but at the same time narrow enough to keep a strong focus for a special issue in JAB.
Nevertheless, I am personally convinced that the future reputation as well the popularity of JAB in the bioanalysis community will depend not only on the publication of interesting and high quality articles but also on a to authors relative time fashionable publication process but with assuring high quality peer review of their manuscripts. JAB operates as many other journals, the traditional double blind peer review model, where a minimum of two to three external reviewers are consulted. 
Prior to external peer review the submissions undergo initial editorial screening accessing clarity topicality, and the relevance of the manuscript’s objectives to the audience. JAB has the potential to become an alternative to established journals its field, journals that either apply restricted pay-wall access to their articles or offer partly freely access to certain articles in their issues (hybrid open access publication). 
JAB will be published using the golden open access publication model with a low rate article processing charge (APC). I am sure that the selected publication model will hopefully in the near future have an important contribution to the increase of a better freely availability of scientific papers not only within the bioanalysis community but also to anyone who’s interested in this exciting area of analytical chemistry. 

Prof.dr. Roland J.W. Meesters
Editor-in-Chief