About

Aims and scope

BMC Cardiovascular Disorders is an open access, peer-reviewed journal that considers articles on all aspects of the prevention, diagnosis and management of disorders of the heart and circulatory system, as well as related molecular and cell biology, genetics, pathophysiology, epidemiology, and controlled trials.

Open access

All articles published by BMC Cardiovascular Disorders 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 BMC Cardiovascular Disorders 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 BioMed Central license agreement.

For those of you 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. BMC Cardiovascular Disorders therefore levies an article-processing charge of £1570.00/$2380.00/€1870.00 for each article accepted for publication, plus VAT or local taxes where applicable.

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.

BMC provides a free open access funding support service to help authors discover and apply for article processing charge funding. Visit our OA funding and policy support page to view our list of research funders and institutions that provide funding for APCs, and to learn more about our email support service.

Indexing services

All articles published in BMC Cardiovascular Disorders are included in:

CABI
CAS
Citebase
Current contents
DOAJ
Embase
Global Health
MEDLINE
OAIster
PubMed
PubMed Central
Science Citation Index Expanded
SCImago
Scopus
SOCOLAR
Zetoc

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.

In cases where the journal is unable to find sufficient peer reviewers, the services of a publishing partner, Research Square, may be used to identify suitable reviewers and provide reports to avoid further delays for authors. Reviewers recruited by Research Square are paid a small honorarium for completing the review within a specified timeframe. Honoraria are paid regardless of the reviewer recommendation.

BMC Cardiovascular Disorders 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.

In cases where reports have been obtained by Research Square, the peer review reports will be unsigned unless the reviewer opts in to sign the report.

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 submitted to BMC Cardiovascular Disorders are assessed by our editors and/or peer reviewers. Overall editorial responsibility for the journal is with the Editor. Section Editors provide oversight for manuscripts submitted to their section with Associate Editors acting as handling editors.

BMC Cardiovascular Disorders is part of the BMC series which publishes subject-specific journals focused on the needs of individual research communities across all scientific and clinical disciplines. We do not make editorial decisions on the basis of the interest of a study or its likely impact. Studies must be scientifically valid; for research articles this includes a scientifically sound research question, the use of suitable methods and analysis, and following community-agreed standards relevant to the research field.

Specific criteria for other article types can be found in the submission guidelines.

BMC series - open, inclusive and trusted.

Editorial policies

All manuscripts submitted to BMC Cardiovascular Disorders 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, in the first instance, contact the Editor who will provide details of the journal's complaints procedure.

Citing articles in BMC Cardiovascular Disorders

Articles in BMC Cardiovascular Disorders 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. BMC Cardiovasc Disord [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. BMC Cardiovasc Disord 2009, 1:115.

refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Why publish your article in BMC Cardiovascular Disorders

High visibility

BMC Cardiovascular Disorders'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

BMC Cardiovascular Disorders 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 BMC Cardiovascular Disorders 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 BMC Cardiovascular Disorders are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be highlighted on BMC Cardiovascular Disorders’s pages and on the BioMed Central homepage.

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

Copyright

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

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