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About

Aims and scope

Implementation Science Communications, an official companion journal to Implementation Science, is a forum to publish research relevant to the systematic study of approaches to foster uptake of evidence based practices and policies that affect health care delivery and health outcomes, in clinical, organizational, or policy contexts.

Health related research constantly produces new findings but often these are not routinely used in practice. Implementation research is the scientific study of methods to promote the systematic uptake of effective clinical treatments, practices, organizational, and management interventions into routine practice, and hence to improve health. This also encompasses the de-implementation of interventions demonstrated to be of low or no clinical benefit and the study of influences on patient, healthcare professional, and organizational behavior in either healthcare or population settings. 

Scientific inquiry related to implementation of evidence based practice and policy is an inherently interdisciplinary research area. Implementation Science Communications will publish articles based on sound science using appropriate methods to produce valid and ideally generalizable answers to research questions. We focus on implementation intervention development, process evaluations, economic evaluations, and theory-based studies. We consider implementation to be on a continuum that ranges from planned implementation to evaluations of natural experiments to planned de-implementation of practices without clear evidence of benefit, and which may have evidence of harm. While we are interested in broadly applicable knowledge, we recognize that smaller studies, with limited generalizability or transferability, conducted with scientific principles, still inform the field. Our goal is to support publishing these smaller, more narrowly focused, articles. 

We welcome study protocols, but these will only be considered if the study has received ethics approval and been approved for funding through external peer review via an established funding body at a regional or national level in the respective country. We do not consider protocols for systematic reviews or protocols for studies that have begun data cleaning or analysis, considering the value of a protocol to be in in early or prospective publication. As a result, we will only consider protocol papers submitted within 12 months of the funding decision. 

Open access

All articles published by Implementation Science Communications 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.

As authors of articles published in Implementation Science Communications you are the copyright holders of your article and have granted to any third party, in advance and in perpetuity, the right to use, reproduce or disseminate your article, according to the BMC license agreement.

For those of you who are US government employees or are prevented from being copyright holders for similar reasons, BMC can accommodate non-standard copyright lines. Please contact us if further information is needed.

Article-processing charges

Open-access publishing is not without costs. Implementation Science Communications therefore levies an article-processing charge of £1390.00/$1990.00/€1590.00 for each article accepted for publication, plus VAT or local taxes where applicable. The APC is determined at the date of acceptance.

If the corresponding author's institution participates in our open access membership program, some or all of the publication cost may be covered (more details available on the membership page). We routinely waive charges for authors from low-income countries. For other countries, article-processing charge waivers or discounts are granted on a case-by-case basis to authors with insufficient funds. Authors can request a waiver or discount during the submission process. For further details, see our article-processing charge page.

Visit Springer Nature’s open access funding & support services for information about research funders and institutions that provide funding for APCs.

Springer Nature offers agreements that enable institutions to cover open-access publishing costs. Learn more about our open access agreements to check your eligibility and discover whether this journal is included.

For more information on APCs please see our Journal Pricing FAQs

Indexing Services

All articles published in Implementation Science Communications are included in:

  • DOAJ
  • PubMed
  • PubMed Central
  • Scopus

The full text of all articles is deposited in digital archives around the world to guarantee long-term digital preservation. You can also access all articles published by BioMed Central on SpringerLink.

We are working closely with relevant indexing services including Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics) to ensure that articles published in Implementation Science Communications will be available in their databases when appropriate.

Peer-review policy

Peer-review is the system used to assess the quality of a manuscript before it is published. Independent researchers in the relevant research area assess submitted manuscripts for originality, validity and significance to help editors determine whether the manuscript should be published in their journal. You can read more about the peer-review process here.

Implementation Science Communications operates an open peer-review system, where the reviewers' names are included on the peer review reports for authors. In addition, if the article is published, the named reviewer reports are published online alongside the article under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0. Previous versions of the manuscript and all author responses to the reviewers are available by contacting info@biomedcentral.com.

The benefit of open peer review is that it increases transparency. The peer reviewers and Editors are fully accountable for the decisions made, bias is reduced as reviewer reports are named, published reports can serve an educational purpose in helping facilitate training and research into peer review, and reviewers can get credit for their work. 

Manuscripts are first assessed by the Editors-in-Chief and may be rejected at this stage. Manuscripts not rejected at this stage will be assigned to a Handling Editor who will oversee the review process. For manuscripts deemed suitable for peer review, two or more expert reviews will be sought. Reviewers may be members of the Editorial Board or external experts in the field. Reviewers are asked to declare any competing interests they may have in reviewing a manuscript.

Citing articles in Implementation Science Communications

Articles in Implementation Science Communications 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. Implement Sci Commun [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. Implement Sci Commun 2019;1:115.

1:115 refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Editorial policies

All manuscripts submitted to Implementation Science Communications should adhere to BMC's editorial policies.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Appeals and complaints

Authors who wish to appeal a rejection or make a complaint should follow the procedure outlined in the BMC Editorial Policies.

Benefits of publishing with BMC

High visibility

Implementation Science Communications's open access policy allows maximum visibility of articles published in the journal as they are available to a wide, global audience. 

Speed of publication

Implementation Science Communications 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 will be published with their final citation after acceptance, in both fully browsable web form, and as a formatted PDF.

Flexibility

Online publication in Implementation Science Communications gives you 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 Implementation Science Communications are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be highlighted on Implementation Science Communications’s pages and on the BMC homepage.

In addition, articles published in Implementation Science Communications 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 Implementation Science Communications. A list of articles recently press-released by journals published by BMC is available here.

Copyright

As an author of an article published in Implementation Science Communications you retain the copyright of your article and you are free to reproduce and disseminate your work (for further details, see the BMC license agreement).

For further information about the advantages of publishing in a journal from BMC, please click here.

Annual Journal Metrics

2022 Speed
15 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median)
148 days submission to accept (Median)

2022 Usage 
427,166 downloads
3,629 Altmetric mentions

More about our metrics