About

Aims and scope

A well-established journal in the field of behavioural and cognitive neuroscience, Behavioral and Brain Functions welcomes manuscripts which provide insight into the neurobiological mechanisms underlying behaviour and brain function, or dysfunction. The journal gives priority to manuscripts that combine both neurobiology and behaviour in a non-clinical manner.

Journal Sections

BBF publishes in the following sections:

Attention, learning and behavior: Animal studies, edited by Ashok Kumar
Human studies, edited by Jessica Damoiseaux
Behavioral neurogenetics and epigenetics, edited by Frank Middleton
Cellular and molecular mechanisms, edited by Yogesh Dwivedi
Computational and neural network modeling, edited by Yasser Roudi
Neurobiology of brain disorders, edited by Matthew Sutherland
Neurobiology of addiction, edited by Clarissa Parker

Open access

All articles published by Behavioral and Brain Functions 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 Behavioral and Brain Functions 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. Behavioral and Brain Functions therefore levies an article-processing charge of £1790.00/$2570.00/€2170.00 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 Behavioral and Brain Functions are included in:

CAS
Citebase
DOAJ
Embase
MEDLINE
OAIster
PsycINFO
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.

Behavioral and Brain Functions has an Impact Factor of 2.449 (2017).

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.

Behavioral and Brain Functions 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 benefits 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 Behavioral and Brain Functions 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

If you wish to appeal a rejection or make a complaint you should, in the first instance, contact the Editor who will provide details of the journal's complaints procedure. For complaints that cannot be resolved with the Editor, the authors should contact the Publisher.

Citing articles in Behavioral and Brain Functions

Articles in Behavioral and Brain Functions 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. Behav Brain Funct [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. Behav Brain Funct 2009, 1:115.

refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Why publish your article in Behavioral and Brain Functions

High visibility

Behavioral and Brain Functions'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

Behavioral and Brain Functions 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 Behavioral and Brain Functions 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 Behavioral and Brain Functions are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be highlighted on Behavioral and Brain Functions’s pages and on the BioMed Central homepage.

In addition, articles published in Behavioral and Brain Functions 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 Behavioral and Brain Functions. 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 Behavioral and Brain Functions 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.