About Head & Face Medicine
This page includes information about the aims and scope of Head & Face Medicine, editorial policies, open access and article-processing charges, the peer review process and other information. For details of how to prepare and submit a manuscript through the online submission system, please see the instructions for authors.
Aims & scope
Head & Face Medicine is a multidisciplinary open access journal that publishes basic and clinical research concerning all aspects of cranial, facial and oral conditions.
The journal covers all aspects of cranial, facial and oral diseases and their management. It has been designed as a multidisciplinary journal for clinicians and researchers involved in the diagnostic and therapeutic aspects of diseases which affect the human head and face. The journal is wide-ranging, covering the development, aetiology, epidemiology and therapy of head and face diseases to the basic science that underlies these diseases. Management of head and face diseases includes all aspects of surgical and non-surgical treatments including psychopharmacological therapies.
To date, no journal has provided readers with multidisciplinary information in the field of head and face medicine. With this expanding field covering surgical and non-surgical management of diseases and including original research concerning basic science, development, aetiology, and epidemiology of diseases in the complex cranial and facial area, information for a broad readership is needed. Head & Face Medicine provides an open access journal that will cover this interdisciplinary area.
Open access
All articles published by Head & Face Medicine are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Further information about open access can be found here.
Authors of articles published in Head & Face Medicine are the copyright holders of their articles and have granted to any third party, in advance and in perpetuity, the right to use, reproduce or disseminate the article, according to the BioMed Central copyright and license agreement.
For authors who are US government employees or are prevented from being copyright holders for similar reasons, BioMed Central can accommodate non-standard copyright lines. Please contact us if further information is needed.
Article-processing charges
Open access publishing is not without costs. Head & Face Medicine therefore levies an article-processing charge of £1290/$2110/€1550 for each article accepted for publication. We routinely waive charges for authors from low-income countries. Generally, if the submitting author's institution is a Member the cost of the article-processing charge is covered by the membership, and no further charge is payable. In the case of authors whose institutions are Supporter Members, however, a discounted article-processing charge is payable by the author. For further details, see our article-processing charge page. A limited number of waivers for article-processing charges are also available at the editors' discretion, and authors wishing to apply for these waivers should contact the editors.
Indexing services
All articles published in Head & Face Medicine are included in PubMed, the most widely used biomedical bibliographic database service, which is run by the US National Library of Medicine. Other bibliographic databases that index articles published in Head & Face Medicine include:
- CAS
- Cases Database
- DOAJ
- Google Scholar
- MEDLINE
- PubMed
- PubMed Central
- Science Citation Index Expanded
- SCImago
- Scopus
The full text of all research articles is deposited in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and other digital archives including e-Depot (The Netherlands). All case reports published in this journal will also be indexed in Cases Database.
Head & Face Medicine is tracked by Thomson Reuters (ISI) and has an Impact Factor of 0.98.
Publication and peer review process
Criteria for publication
Head & Face Medicine considers the following types of articles:
- Research: reports of data from original research.
- Hypothesis: short articles presenting an untested original hypothesis backed solely by previously published results rather than any new evidence. They should outline significant progress in thinking that would also be testable.
- Methodology: 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.
- Review: comprehensive, authoritative, descriptions of any subject within the scope of the journal. These articles are also written by opinion leaders that have been invited by the Editorial Board.
- Short report: brief reports of data from original research.
- Letter to the Editor: these can take three forms: a substantial re-analysis of a previously published article, or a substantial response to such a re-analysis from the authors of the original publication, or an article that may not cover 'standard research' but that may be relevant to readers.
- Case report: reports of clinical cases that can be educational, describe a diagnostic or therapeutic dilemma, suggest an association, or present an important adverse reaction. Please note that only those case report articles of exceptional interest will be considered for publication in the journal. All case report articles should indicate that informed consent to publish the information was granted from the patients or their guardians.
Peer-review policies
The journal has an open peer-review policy, with authors and reviewers asked to declare any competing interests. When making a decision regarding acceptance/rejection, reviewers are asked to consider whether the scientific community is better served by publishing or not publishing the article. This decision should be independent of the 'positive' or 'negative' nature of the results, where 'negative' means that the findings do not reflect the current 'opinion of experts'. The journal welcomes such findings if they are scientifically justified. The ultimate responsibility for any decision lies with the Editors-in-Chief.
Edited by Thomas Stamm, Ulrich Meyer and Hans-Peter Wiesmann, Head & Face Medicine is supported by an expert Editorial Board.
Head & Face Medicine operates an 'open peer review' policy meaning reviewers are asked to sign their reviews. The pre-publication history including all submitted versions, reviewers' reports and authors' responses will be linked to from the published article.
Authors will be able to check the progress of their manuscript through the submission system at any time by logging into My Head & Face Medicine, a personalized section of the site.
Reprints
High-quality, bound reprints can be purchased for all articles published. Please see our reprints website for further information about ordering reprints.
Supplements
Head & Face Medicine will consider supplements based on proceedings (full articles or meeting abstracts), reviews or research. All articles submitted for publication in supplements are subject to peer review. Published supplements are fully searchable and freely accessible online and can also be produced in print. All full length articles (proceedings, reviews or research articles) are indexed by PubMed. PubMed displays the title of the supplement only in the case of meeting abstract collections. For further information, please contact us.
Editorial policies
All manuscripts submitted to Head & Face Medicine should adhere to BioMed Central's editorial policies.
Citing articles in Head & Face Medicine
Articles in Head & Face Medicine should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. Because articles are not printed, they do not have page numbers; instead, they are given a unique article number.
Article citations follow this format:
Authors: Title. Head Face Med [year], [volume number]:[article number].
e.g. Roberts LD, Hassall DG, Winegar DA, Haselden JN, Nicholls AW, Griffin JL: Increased hepatic oxidative metabolism distinguishes the action of Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor delta from Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor gamma in the Ob/Ob mouse. Head Face Med 2009, 1:115.
refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.
Why publish your article in Head & Face Medicine?
High visibility
Head & Face Medicine's open access policy allows maximum visibility of articles published in the journal as they are available to a wide, global audience. Articles that have been especially highly accessed are highlighted with a 'Highly accessed' graphic, which appears on the journal's contents pages and search results.
Speed of publication
Head & Face Medicine offers a fast publication schedule whilst maintaining rigorous peer review; all articles must be submitted online, and peer review is managed fully electronically (articles are distributed in PDF form, which is automatically generated from the submitted files). Articles are published with their final citation immediately upon acceptance in a provisional PDF form. The article will subsequently be published in both fully browsable web form, and as a formatted PDF; the article will then be available through Head & Face Medicine, BioMed Central and PubMed Central and will also be included in PubMed.
Flexibility
Online publication in Head & Face Medicine gives authors the opportunity to publish large datasets, large numbers of color illustrations and moving pictures, to display data in a form that can be read directly by other software packages so as to allow readers to manipulate the data for themselves, and to create all relevant links (for example, to PubMed, to sequence and other databases, and to other articles).
Promotion and press coverage
Articles published in Head & Face Medicine are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be included in abstract books mailed to academics and are highlighted on Head & Face Medicine's pages and on the BioMed Central homepage.
In addition, articles published in Head & Face Medicine may be promoted by press releases to the general or scientific press. These activities increase the exposure and number of accesses for articles published in Head & Face Medicine. A list of articles recently press-released by journals published by BioMed Central is available here.
Copyright
Authors of articles published in Head & Face Medicine retain the copyright of their articles and are free to reproduce and disseminate their work (for further details, see the BioMed Central copyright and license agreement).
For further information about the advantages of publishing in a journal from BioMed Central, please click here.