BioMed Central is pleased to announce an increased involvement with Peerage of Science, stepping up to full membership for four of our journals: Frontiers in Zoology, BMC Ecology, BMC Evolutionary Biology and BMC Biology. Peerage of Science is a new peer review initiative launched in 2011 with a mission of changing how peer review is done; the move to join this initiative is in response to feedback from our editors and the scientific community at large.

Our editors are now able to select high quality articles submitted to Peerage of Science for peer review , and extend ‘publishing offers’ to authors, inviting them to publish their manuscript inour journals taking advantage of an expedited peer review.  This benefits authors who may otherwise undergo unnecessary further peer review, possibly submitting to several journals and undergoing numerous rounds of review and rejections before finding the most appropriate home for their research. Readers also benefit from earlier publication of high quality research in our journals.

Frontiers in Zoology co-Editor-in-Chief, Diethard Tautz explains “We consider Peerage of Science as an interesting new approach in reviewing and publishing procedures. Many papers submitted to Peerage of Science fall into the scope of Frontiers of Zoology and we will be happy to accept the best ones for our journal.”

For those who are not already familiar with Peerage of Science, a summary can be found on a previous blog post on the BMC-Series blog, and further information on how Peerage of Science was formed and works can be found in a recent Q&A with co-founder Janne-Tuomas Seppännen in our online magazine, Biome.

We expect that by joining as full members we will be further meeting the needs of ecologists,  evolutionary biologists and researchers in other involved disciplines, and engaging with the communities in which they work.