Welcome to the fifth volume of Journal of Applied Bioanalysis

Correspondence: Meesters RJ. ^†Present address: MLM Medical Labs GmbH, Dohrweg 63, 41066 Mönchengladbach, Germany. Phone: +31 (0)681585826

Citation:
Meesters RJ. Welcome to the fourth volume of the Journal of Applied Bioanalysis. J Appl Bioanal 5(1), 1-6 (2019).

Open-access and Copyright: ©2019 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: 03 January 2019, Revised 8 January 2019, Accepted 11 January 2019.

Keywords

Bioanalysis, journal of applied bioanalysis, bioanalytical chemistry, research.

On behalf of all editorial board members from the Journal of Applied Bioanalysis, I welcome you to the journal’s fifth volume. As I also did in previous three years, I’ll start this foreword article with taking the opportunity to wish all of you a successful 2019. A special “thank you” is going out to all our authors, and reviewers, as well to the journal’s editorial board for their continued professional support. I hope that 2019 will hold for your success and good fortune in any endeavor you will pursue in the year that’s ahead of you. In the this foreword article, I’ll look back at the journal’s past year’s achievements and special moments.

Highlights 2018

Betasciencepress Publishing, the STM publishing cooperation of the Journal of Applied Bioanalysis has since the publisher was founded in 2015, continuously supported initiatives on Open Access Publishing and Open Science. The collaboration with ScienceOpen Inc.[1], which started in 2017 was continued in 2018. All published articles published from the first volume (2015) until the fourth volume (2018) are indexed and available in the article collection at ScienceOpen.com. Since the start of the collaboration with ScienceOpen.com, the article collection has received a total of approx. 15,000 article views and many of the available articles were shared via social media at the time of writing this foreword article (January 2019).

Last year we’ve decided also to strengthen our collaboration with ReviewerCredits.com [2] and to do so, the journal will actively start offering the APC discount program offered by ReviewerCredits.com. The APC discount program offers offer members of ReviewCredits.com a discount on the APC of OA journals. Journal of Applied Bioanalysis will also start offering this APC discount programme to authors from the moment on the APC discount programme is officially active (approx. February 2019).
Next, to the direct APC discount affred by using a discount token, ReviewerCredits.com members can also redeem collected credits received from each performed and at ReviewerCredits.com registered manuscript review. Collected credits can be exchanged for APC discount. The service offered by ReviewerCredits.com also provides each member an personal Reviewer Index. The Reviewer Index is determined based on the number of performed peer-reviews. The Reviewer Index reflects the scientist ’s activity as a reviewer, hence, the contribution to the advancement of Science.

Figures and Tables

[Click to enlarge]

Number of issues published in 2018

In the fourth volume, five issues presenting a variety of peer-reviewed articles from research areas such as therapeutic drug monitoring, micro-sampling, pharmaceutical analysis, bioanalytical guidelines and regulations, analysis of antibodies, biomonitoring, and natural products were published. Among the published articles were editorial-, expert opinion, original research and review articles.
In the first issue of the fourth volume, the “Meet the Editor” editorial article was introduced as a new editorial. In this editorial, editorial board members will present in a professional way to the journal’s audience their scientific achievements such as research projects, publications, and grants. One of the published “Meet the Editor” editorials in 2018 made it even into the list of ten most viewed and/or downloaded articles published in 2018 (see Table 1). This demonstrates that through this editorial, editorial board members can gain easily much attention from the bioanalysis community, leading to more international visibility and recognitition as expert in the area of Bioanalysis. Details of the ten most viewed and downloaded articles published in the issues from fourth volume are presented in Table 1.

Special focus issues published in 2018

In 2018, one special focused issue was published (Vol. 4 No. 5). The fifth issue (December 2018) was a special focused issue on “Current LC-MS/MS Techniques for Therapeutic Drug Monitoring in Infectious Diseases” was published. The special focused issue aimed to highlight current applications and developments in the field of LC-MS/MS techniques applied in therapeutic drug monitoring of antibiotic, antifungal and anti(retro)viral drugs. The guest editors were Prof. Dr. Jan-Willem Alffenaar and Prof. Dr. Daan Touw, both from the University of Groningen, University Medical Center of Groningen, the Netherlands.

October 15, was the submission period for the second special focused issue was openedn with the aim to highlight “Current Education in Bioanalytical Chemistry”. The manuscript submission period will close on May 1, 2019. In this special focused issue, new developments and insights into the education of (bio)analytical chemistry are presented. The views and insights will not only be from a scientific perspective but also with a broader view, including educational organization, didactics, and strategies are planned to be presented.
The special focused issue welcomes manuscripts related to (but not limited to):
– Instrumental analysis, instrumentation, and analytical techniques
– Chemometrics, Statistics, and Design of Experiment
– Biomolecules, Proteomics, Metabolomics and other “omics”
– Quality Assurance, Validation, and Qualification
– University strategies
– In-house Education experiences
– Software in support of (analytical) education
– Internships, Graduation Research
– Growing student’s interest and raising student numbers
– The roles of universities, coarse and training companies, and self-education

More information on the special focused issue on “Current Education in Bioanalytical Chemistry” can be found at the journal’s website [3]. In the 2019, more special focused issues will be published. To stay up to date on manuscript submission deadlines and other interesting information, I would advise to check the journal’s website regularly or contact the editorial office ([email protected]).

Special focused issues: call for proposals

The editorial office invites scientists and scholars to submit a proposal for a special focused issue. The purpose of the special focused issue is to provide the scientific community with a collection of articles on a specific topic. The topic as well should not have been covered substantially by the Journal as have a great potential to be of high interest to the general scientific community.
For the fifth volume, special focused issue proposals are due on May 1, 2019 and October 1, 2019. Proposals will be competitively evaluated by the journal’s senior editorial team.
Please send your proposal or further questions you may have to editorial office ([email protected]) or download information on how to prepare a special issue proposal https://betasciencepress.com/index.php/call-for-special-issue-proposals

Journal of Applied Bioanalysis facts

The Journal of Applied Bioanalysis aims to publish high-quality articles presenting recent developments and applications in bioanalysis. In contrast, to other journals in the area of bioanalysis (bioanalytical chemistry), all articles are published with the Open Access option (CC BY).
The journal has the lowest APC fee of all journals publishing in the area of this exciting subarea of analytical chemistry. In an era that open science and freely available scientific information are becoming aswell more important, as more demanding, the journal is supporting Open Access publishing for the past four years and will keep doing this for the many years to come.
Currently, the mean time from manuscript submission to first decision in the Journal of Applied Bioanalysis is about 18-25 days. The mean time from manuscript submission to final decision is less than 45 days, which is attributed to the rapid editorial processing of the papers upon receipt of the manuscript.

Online manuscript submission

In October 2018, manuscript submission and manuscript tracking were transferred from the Scholastica platform, which was used for three years, to the ManuscriptManager® manuscript submission and tracking platform. The ManuscriptManager® platform offers a simple and user-friendly interface to authors for the submission of manuscripts as well for peer-review for reviewing and submission of peer review reports in a timely manner.
On behalf of the editorial board, I kindly invite you to contact the editorial office with suggestions and ideas for improvement of offered services, or for proposals for special focused issues.

Demographics of author and reader audience

The journal’s website received in 2018 significant more article views/downloads, the annual article views/downloads increased by 171 % compared to views/downloads obtained in 2017.
The Journal of Applied Bioanalysis has experienced since its launch in 2015 a steady and continues growth of visits from around the globe. Article views/downloads from approx. 130 different countries around the world were observed. The majority of the journal’s article views/downloads originated from visitors located in the Americas (37.1 %) and Europe (35.2%) while also article views/downloads from other continents was observed (Figure 1). In 2018 the article views/downloads from Asia increased significantly to a total of 24.0 % of all article views/downloads.
The journal received in 2018 manuscript submissions from authors mainly from USA and Europe, the 2018 authorship demographics showed that 21.5 % of the submitted articles originated from authors located in the Americas (mainly USA) and 78.5 % from authors from Europe.
The majority of the article views/downloads are still coming from visitors using desktop computers although the article visits/downloads using mobile devices increased in 2018 about 3.3 % compared to 2017, resulting in a total of 20.92 % (Figure 2) of all views.

Social media is a great tool to inform the journal’s audience and the general bioanalysis community on new developments, announce journal related news, conduct surveys, announce webinars and many more and at last but not least for reaching out to scientists interested in bioanalysis.
The journal is active on social media platforms like LinkedIn (Journal of Applied Bioanalysis group) [14], Twitter (@JABeditor) [15], and on Facebook [17]. Using different social media platforms give the journal the possibility to provide its followers with the latest journal updates, news or other interesting information related to bioanalysis.

Acknowledgement/Closing

I like to thank the dedicated support of all authors, editorial board members, and all peer-reviewers and thank all very much, knowing that without your support the fourth issue of the Journal of Applied Bioanalysis would not have been possible. I appreciate all the positive feedback the journal received but also the great ideas for improvement we got from authors and peer-reviewers. The ideas will be used to further improve the quality of the journal, and in making the Journal of Applied Bioanalysis, the number one (Open Access) journal in the field of Bioanalysis.

I look forward to working with all of you again in the new year 2019.

Dr. Roland J.W. Meesters
Editor-in-Chief Journal of Applied Bioanalysis

References

1.http://www.scienceopen.com
2. http://www.reviewercredits.com
3. https://betasciencepress.com/index.php/for-authors/journal-of-applied-bioanalysis/issues/special-focused-issues/current-education-in-bioanalytical-chemistry
4. Gaugler S, Rykl J, Grill M, Cebolla VM. Fully automated drug screening of dried blood spots using inline LC-MS/MS analysis. J Appl Bioanal 4(1), 7-15 (2018). [CrossRef]
5. Daskapan A, van Hateren K, Stienstra Y, Kosterink J, van der Werf T, Touw D, Alffenaar JW. Develop¬ment and validation of a bioanalytical method for the simultaneous determi¬nation of 14 antiretroviral drugs using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. J Appl Bioanal 4(2), 32-45 (2018). [CrossRef]
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9. Clifford M. How CROs can gain a competitive advantage in the Bioanalysis market. J Appl Bioanal 4(4), 109-113 (2018). [CrossRef]
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11. Panderi I. Meet our Editorial Board Member: Dr. Eirini Panteri (Irene Panderi). J Appl Bioanal 4(3), 62-66 (2018). [CrossRef]
12. Muñoz E and Piñeiro A. AFFINImeter Software: from its Beginnings to Future Trends-A Literature review. J Appl Bioanal 4(4), 124-139 (2018). [CrossRef]
13. Drexler DM, McNaney CA, Wang Y, Huang X, Reily MD. The utility of qNMR to improve accuracy and precision of LC-MS bioanalysis. J Appl Bioanal 4(1), 26-31 (2018). [CrossRef]
14. www.linkedin.com
15. www.twitter.com/JABeditor
16. www.facebook.com/JABjournal