Skip to main content

About

Aims and scope

Zoological Letters is an open access journal that publishes new and important findings in the zoological sciences. As a sister journal to Zoological Science, Zoological Letters covers a wide range of basic fields of zoology, from taxonomy to bioinformatics. We also welcome submissions of paleontology reports as part of our effort to contribute to the development of new perspectives in evolutionary zoology. Our goal is to serve as a global publishing forum for fundamental researchers in all fields of zoology.

Why publish your article in Zoological Letters?

  • We are the official open access journal of the Zoological Society of Japan, one of the oldest and most successful academic societies in Japan.
  • Publication costs are partially supported by the Zoological Society of Japan, and our internationally renowned editorial board offers expert advice.
  • Open access publication ensures that your article can be easily discovered, accessed, used, and shared, maximising your impact and acting as a springboard for further discovery.

Open access

All articles published by Zoological Letters 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 Zoological Letters 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. Zoological Letters therefore levies an article-processing charge of £1490.00/$2190.00/€1790.00 for each article accepted for publication, plus VAT or local taxes where applicable.

For more information on APCs please see our Journal Pricing FAQs


Indexing services

All articles published in Zoological Letters are included in:

  • BIOSIS
  • CAS
  • DOAJ
  • EBSCO
  • Google Scholar
  • OCLC WorldCat
  • PubMed Central
  • Science Citation Index - Expanded
  • Scopus
  • Zoological Records

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.

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.

Zoological Letters operates a single-blind peer-review system, where the reviewers are aware of the names and affiliations of the authors, but the reviewer reports provided to authors are anonymous.

The benefit of single-blind peer review is that it is the traditional model of peer review that many reviewers are comfortable with, and it facilitates a dispassionate critique of a manuscript.

Submitted manuscripts will generally be reviewed by two or more experts who will be asked to evaluate whether the manuscript is scientifically sound and coherent, whether it duplicates already published work, and whether or not the manuscript is sufficiently clear for publication. The Editors will reach a decision based on these reports and, where necessary, they will consult with members of the Editorial Board.

Editorial policies

All manuscripts submitted to Zoological Letters should adhere to BioMed Central'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.

Citing articles in Zoological Letters

Articles in Zoological Letters 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. Zoological Lett [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. Zoological Lett 2009, 1:115.

refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Benefits of publishing with BMC

High visibility

Zoological Letters'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

Zoological Letters 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 Zoological Letters 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 Zoological Letters are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be highlighted on Zoological Letters’s pages and on the BMC homepage.

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

Copyright

As an author of an article published in Zoological Letters 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.

ZooDiversity Web is a search and access website that provides an attractive and easy-to-use internet search engine and showcase for scientific papers published since 1984 in the English-language journal of the Zoological Society of Japan (Zoological Science). These papers include over 4,000 peer-reviewed articles on a great diversity of over 13,000 different species of animals.

Annual Journal Metrics

  • 2022 Citation Impact
    2.7 - 2-year Impact Factor
    3.1 - 5-year Impact Factor
    1.479 - SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper)
    0.914 - SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)

    2023 Speed
    6 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median)
    136 days submission to accept (Median)

    2023 Usage 
    330,073 downloads
    649 Altmetric mentions