Updated July 2022
Mission
eNeuro’s mission is to publish excellent science that can be discussed, debated, studied, and built upon to advance the understanding of the brain and nervous system.
At the core of eNeuro is a commitment to provide authors with a fair assessment of their work, with any additional experiments requested thoroughly justified, while maintaining high standards of peer review. An international, gender-balanced editorial board, a double-blind peer-review system, and an unambiguous consensus review contribute to a fair, rapid, and transparent experience for authors.
“We want eNeuro to become the flagship of open access neuroscience journals, and to build a reputation for scientific excellence consistent with everything the Society for Neuroscience does in the field. We want authors to have a constructive and satisfying experience with the evaluation of their research. eNeuro is designed to publish studies that will move forward the many areas of neuroscience.”
– Christophe Bernard, Editor-in-Chief
Aims and Scope
eNeuro is SfN’s open access, multidisciplinary journal that publishes high quality papers in all areas of neuroscience that increase our understanding of the nervous system including molecular, cellular, developmental, cognitive and behavioral research, animal model and computational modeling studies of any length. In addition to original research, the editors encourage submissions that report negative results, and replication studies. These papers, along with reviews, method papers, commentaries and opinions, serve the neuroscience community with both new and sometimes controversial findings.
Criteria
To warrant publication in eNeuro, a manuscript must provide information that is important to the targeted scientific audience. Importance does not necessarily mean mechanistic insight. It can be an observation, but an important one that can move a field forward. We acknowledge that “importance” has a personal valence, but this will be evaluated in a consensual manner by the reviewing editor and the reviewers. They are instructed to answer a simple question: do we learn something useful or important?
More about eNeuro
To support its mission, eNeuro is committed to the following values:
1. Scientific excellence and rigor
We value scientific studies that reflect unbiased and repeatable experiments, methods, procedures, analysis, and reporting to advance the field of neuroscience. We value all studies that advance the field, including replication studies, negative results, novel tools or methods, and Registered Reports [PDF].
Our commitment to scientific rigor is reflected in our policies, which are evaluated on an ongoing basis to respond to developments and standards in the field.
2. Open access
We strive to be the best open access, neuroscience-specific journal, and we value the importance of access and exchange of great science.
In keeping with this spirit, eNeuro articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. Per the terms of this license, it is not necessary to obtain permission or pay a fee to reuse eNeuro content, provided that a full acknowledgment is made to the original publication in eNeuro.
3. Representation of the breadth of the neuroscience field
Currently, we publish within these broad collections:
- ⁘ Cognition and Behavior
- ⁘ Development
- ⁘ Disorders of the Nervous System
- ⁘ History, Teaching, and Public Awareness
- ⁘ Integrative Systems
- ⁘ Neuronal Excitability
- ⁘ Novel Tools and Methods
- ⁘ Sensory and Motor Systems
eNeuro also publishes a feature article type, Research Highlights, that discusses recently published research in the journal. Aimed at a broad scientific audience, the research highlight places the new findings within the context of current scientific knowledge in the area of neuroscience to which the research relates. The Research Highlights also discusses future, real-world implications of the findings.
4. Fair, transparent, fast, and constructive experience in peer review
We aim to provide authors with a fair, satisfying, and constructive experience with the evaluation of their research, limiting requests for additional experiments and ensuring that such requests are thoroughly justified to allow for the swift dissemination of strong science. By limiting requests for additional experiments, we have been able to provide a quick editorial response from the time of submission to a first decision (median is 26 days).
At eNeuro we employ two methods to provide authors with a fair, transparent and constructive peer review process: double-blind review and consensus and synthesis review.
Double-blind review eNeuro strives to mitigate the potential for implicit bias by utilizing the double-blind review process, which means the identities of both the authors and reviewers are concealed throughout the review process. Please review the information for authors for a guide on how to submit your manuscript without revealing your identity. Read Christophe Bernard’s editorial analyzing how the double-blind review system at eNeuro may mitigate gender bias in publishing.
Consultation and synthesis During peer review, the reviewers and editors will enter into a consultation process to come to a consensus on the decision and create a clear synthesis of what the author should do to improve the paper. This synthesis is published along with each article.
5. Prompt and effective dissemination of peer-reviewed science
We are committed to publishing papers as quickly as possible, while maintaining scientific excellence and rigor. Publishing on a continuous schedule, eNeuro publishes papers a median of 17 days from acceptance.
As a journal of the Society for Neuroscience, eNeuro provides the publishing venue that can reach the largest neuroscience community in the world.
Our communications team works actively to alert the press to articles published in the journals, which has resulted in recent research highlights featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Newsweek, TIME, HuffPost. eNeuro also provides Altmetrics to track the visibility of published articles in online and traditional media outlets. We welcome you to read about the many ways we work to disseminate research to the field.
6. Diversity
We are committed to ensuring diversity across gender, age, and geography among editorial board members and reviewers.
We value the reviewers who generously contribute their time and expertise to serve the field. Each year, we recognize our top reviewers who helped make eNeuro successful.
7. Education
We strive to provide information and training to the scientific community in important areas of scientific communication, methodology, and peer review.
For example, to engage new reviewers and provide training in fair, rigorous, and constructive review, eNeuro Offers a Unique Interactive Experience to Reviewer Training—our webinar series on How to Peer Review a Manuscript—that allows trainees, after registering, to download the first submitted version of an eNeuro publication, and walk through their own review process with the host during the webinar.
8. Innovation and experimentation
We value the need for innovation in publishing and seek to experiment with emerging publishing concepts that strengthen the ability to effectively share science with the community.
eNeuro hopes to drive change to provide a positive author experience in peer review, as well as strengthen science.
Publishing concepts adopted at eNeuro include double-blind review, consultation and synthesis review, as well as the decision to reject manuscripts that require more experiments. These practices have created an effective, fast, and positive peer review process for both reviewers and authors.
Additionally, eNeuro now accepts Registered Reports, a manuscript type that accepts the methodology ahead of the researchers running the experiment, and then once the methodology has been peer reviewed and accepted, the resulting manuscript is provisionally accepted for publication after the completion of the experiment.
9. Commentary and discussion
Our aim is to engage the neuroscience community in commentary and discussion about science and publishing.
This was one reason why we decided to create the eNeuro blog. Come join the discussion.
Watch Editors-in-Chief Christophe Bernard and Marina Picciotto discuss their perspectives on how SfN journals support the field. Read about how SfN journals fulfill their missions by encouraging innovation and disseminating science to the community in the Spring 2018 Neuroscience Quarterly.
Indexing and Citation Information
eNeuro has received a 2021 Journal Impact Factor of 4.363.
eNeuro has received a 2021 CiteScore of 5.5.
eNeuro is also indexed in PubMed, PubMed Central, Web of Science Core Collection/Science Citation Index Expanded, Scopus, and EMBASE.
History
After hearing from its members and listening to the needs of the field, SfN decided that a neuroscience open access journal complementing The Journal of Neuroscience would align with the mission of the Society and would serve the field. The process of planning to launch a new journal began after the 2011 SfN Annual Meeting. On November 12, 2014, eNeuro launched with 10 papers. Since then eNeuro has grown rapidly in publications and innovations. You can capture snapshots of the journal's growth with each editorial from the Editor-in-Chief.
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