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About AACI

Aims and scope | Open access | Article-processing charges | Indexing services | Publication and peer review process | Editorial policies | Citing articles in AACI | Why publish your article in AACI?

This page includes information about the aims and scope of AACI, 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

Allergy, Asthma & Clinical Immunology encompasses all aspects of treatment of allergic and immunologic disease.

The journal's latest review supplement "Practical guide for allergy and immunology in Canada" provides a comprehensive guide on all of the common conditions dealt with in the field of allergy and immunology. Read the supplement now.

AACI, the official journal of the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (CSACI), is an open access journal that aims to further the understanding and treatment of allergic and immunologic disease.

By offering a high-visibility forum for new insights and discussions, the journal provides a platform for the dissemination of allergy and clinical immunology research and reviews amongst allergists, immunologists and other physicians, healthcare workers, medical students and the public worldwide. This journal was previously published by BC Decker and for further information about the previous content, please contact the editorial e-mail address at:editorial@aacijournal.com.

The fields of allergy and clinical immunology concern human diseases in which disorders of the immune system play a significant role. It is considered that diseases of the immune system are best understood through a clear grasp of normal immune mechanisms and the ways in which these processes become dysfunctional.

AACI reports on basic research and clinically applied studies in the following areas and other related topics: asthma and occupational lung disease, rhinoconjunctivitis and rhinosinusitis, drug hypersensitivity, allergic skin diseases, urticaria and angioedema, venom hypersensitivity, anaphylaxis and food allergy, immunotherapy, immune modulators and biologics, immune deficiency and autoimmunity, T cell and B cell functions, regulatory T cells, natural killer cells, mast cell and eosinophil functions, complement abnormalities.

Open access

All articles published by AACI 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 AACI 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.

Article-processing charges

Open access publishing is not without costs. AACI therefore levies an article-processing charge of £1115/$1715/€1310 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 AACI 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 AACI include:

  • CAS
  • Embase
  • Food Science and Technology Abstracts
  • PubMed
  • PubMed Central
  • 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).

AACI has an unofficial Impact Factor of 3.0. BioMed Central is working with Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in AACI will be available.

Publication and peer review process

Content overview

AACI considers the following types of articles:

  • Research: reports of data from original research.
  • Reviews: comprehensive, authoritative, descriptions of any subject within the journal's scope. Reviews are often commissioned from experts in the field, and should have an educational aim.
  • Case reports: reports of clinical cases that can be educational, describe a diagnostic or therapeutic dilemma, suggest an association, or present an important adverse reaction. All case report articles should indicate that informed consent to publish the information was granted from the patients or their guardians.
  • 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.

Peer-review policies

The reports of at least two reviewers will be considered when deciding on acceptance or rejection of a manuscript. Final decisions rest with the Editors-in-Chief who aim to provide an initial decision within six weeks. In cases where authors challenge an Editor's negative decision with well founded arguments, the manuscript can be sent to one or two additional reviewers at the discretion of the Handling Editor, and a final decision will be made upon their recommendations. Manuscripts are sent to statisticians at the request of reviewers.

Edited by Richard Warrington, AACI is supported by an expert Editorial Board.

Authors will be able to check the progress of their manuscript through the submission system at any time by logging into My Allergy, Asthma & Clinical Immunology, 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

AACI 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 AACI should adhere to BioMed Central's editorial policies.

Citing articles in AACI

Articles in AACI 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. Allergy Asthma Clin Immunol [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. Allergy Asthma Clin Immunol 2009, 1:115.

refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Why publish your article in AACI?

High visibility

AACI'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

AACI 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 AACI, BioMed Central and PubMed Central and will also be included in PubMed.

Flexibility

Online publication in AACI 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 papers).

Promotion and press coverage

Articles published in AACI are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be included in abstract books mailed to academics and are highlighted on AACI's pages and on the BioMed Central homepage.

In addition, articles published in AACI 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 AACI. A list of articles recently press-released by journals published by BioMed Central is available here.

Authors of articles published in AACI 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.