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About

Aims and scope

AAPS Open, the flagship open access journal of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, provides a global forum for the rapid publication of original research and discussion that demonstrates applications of scientific concepts and techniques across the breadth of the pharmaceutical sciences.

Fully peer-reviewed, AAPS Open welcomes reports from experimental or theoretical studies during the entire course of development of a drug candidate, for both synthetic drugs as well as biopharmaceutical products including vaccines, cell and gene therapeutics, and other new modalities such as nucleotide-based therapeutics.

The journal’s interest in drug development research includes - but is not limited to - drug discovery, translational research, preclinical studies, pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamics studies, formulation design and stability testing, drug delivery and drug administration including all aspects around combination products, analytical assay development and validation, modeling and simulation approaches, mechanistic studies, drug substance and drug product manufacturing, clinical evaluation, as well as regulatory topics or post-launch activities.

AAPS Open specifically welcomes white papers, commentaries, and perspectives from experts in their field, as well as meeting reports, and review or brief review articles. For reports of primary research, a high degree of innovation is required.

Benefits of publishing with SpringerOpen

High visibility

AAPS Open'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

AAPS Open 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; the article will then be available through AAPS Open and SpringerOpen.

Flexibility

Online publication in AAPS Open 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 AAPS Open are included in article alerts and regular email updates. 
In addition, articles published in AAPS Open 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 AAPS Open

Copyright

Authors of articles published in AAPS Open retain the copyright of their articles and are free to reproduce and disseminate their work (for further details, see the copyright and license agreement).

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

Open access

All articles published by the AAPS Open 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 the AAPS Open 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 SpringerOpen copyright and license agreement.

For those of you who are US government employees or are prevented from being copyright holders for similar reasons, SpringerOpen can accommodate non-standard copyright lines. Please contact us if further information is needed.

Article-processing charges

Open access publishing is not without costs. AAPS Open therefore levies an article-processing charge of £1290.00/$1990.00/€1690.00 for each article accepted for publication.

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.

Visit Springer Nature’s open access funding & support services for information about research funders and institutions that provide funding for APCs.

Springer Nature offers agreements that enable institutions to cover open access publishing costs. Learn more about our open access agreements to check your eligibility and discover whether this journal is included.

For more information on APCs please see our Journal Pricing FAQs

Indexing services

The full text of all articles are freely available on springer.com, and on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). To guarantee long-term digital preservation, they are also deposited in the digital archives CLOCKS and PORTICO.  New journals have to meet specific criteria before it can be submitted to particular indexing services, and these criteria (minimum number of years of publication and/or articles) vary by service. At present, we are working towards those thresholds for submission as a priority. Our indexing team then works the various abstracting and indexing services to ensure that articles published in AAPS Open will be available in such databases as PubMed Central and Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics) as soon as possible.

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.

AAPS Open 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 AAPS Open should adhere to SpringerOpen's editorial policies.

Once your article is accepted, it will be processed by production and published shortly afterwards. In some cases, articles may be held for a short period of time prior to publication. If you have any concerns or particular requirements please contact the Journal.

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.

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Annual Journal Metrics

  • 2023 Speed
    14 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median)
    96 days submission to accept (Median)

    2023 Usage 
    167,495 downloads
    29 Altmetric mentions