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About

Aims and scope

Research Involvement and Engagement is an interdisciplinary, health and social care journal focussing on patient and wider involvement and engagement in research, at all stages. The journal is co-produced by all key stakeholders, including patients, academics, policy makers and service users.

Focussing on patient and public involvement and engagement in health and social care research, we welcome research articles, methodologies, protocols and commentaries, particularly those with patient authors. All submissions are peer-reviewed by patients and academics and are edited by a patient and an academic editor, who have equal weight in editorial decisions. We encourage submissions from anyone who is committed to delivering the patient or public voice in research.

A co-produced journal

Research Involvement and Engagement co-produces the journal, involving academics, policy makers, patients and service-users, with a unique governance structure. We welcome articles from anyone involved or engaged with research into supporting, encouraging or delivering the patient/public voice in research processes or structures

Research Involvement and Engagement is a Patients Included accredited journal. Full details on how we meet the Patients Included journal charter clauses can be found here.

Open access

All articles published by Research Involvement and Engagement 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 Research Involvement and Engagement 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 BMC license agreement.

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

Article processing charges (APC)

Authors who publish open access in Research Involvement and Engagement are required to pay an article processing charge (APC). The APC price will be determined from the date on which the article is accepted for publication.

The current APC, subject to VAT or local taxes where applicable, is: £1790.00/$2490.00/€2090.00

Visit our open access support portal and our Journal Pricing FAQs for further information.

Open access funding

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.

Springer Nature offers APC waivers and discounts for articles published in our fully open access journals whose corresponding authors are based in the world’s lowest income countries (see our APC waivers and discounts policy for further information). Requests for APC waivers and discounts from other authors will be considered on a case-by-case basis, and may be granted in cases of financial need (see our open access policies for journals for more information). All applications for discretionary APC waivers and discounts should be made at the point of manuscript submission; requests made during the review process or after acceptance are unable to be considered.

Indexing services

All articles published in Research Involvement and Engagement are included in:

  • CNKI
  • DOAJ
  • EBSCO Discovery Service
  • EBSCO Sociology Source Ultimate
  • EBSCO TOC Premier
  • Google Scholar
  • OCLC WorldCat Discovery
  • ProQuest-ExLibris Primo
  • ProQuest-ExLibris Summon
  • PubMed Central
  • Scopus

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.

We are working closely with relevant indexing services including Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics) to ensure that articles published in Research Involvement and Engagement will be available in their databases when appropriate.

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.

Research Involvement and Engagement 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.

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.

Research Involvement and Engagement co-produces the journal, involving academics, policy makers, patients and service-users, with a unique governance structure. We welcome manuscripts from anyone involved or engaged with research into supporting, encouraging or delivering the patient/public voice in research processes or structures.

Submitted manuscripts will generally be reviewed by two or more experts, from both academic and patient backgrounds, 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.

Peer review taxonomy

Research Involvement and Engagement and Springer Nature are participating in a pilot of STM's Working Group on Peer Review Taxonomy.

More publishers are adopting open peer review as an operating model. STM, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, has identified a need to promote the adoption of standard definitions and terminology in peer review practices across all publishers. An agreed peer review taxonomy will help make the peer review process for articles and journals more transparent and more comparable between different journals.

Taxonomy:

Identity transparency:

All identities visible

Reviewer interacts with:

Editor

Review information published:

Review reports, reviewer identities

We would welcome your feedback on the Peer Review Taxonomy Pilot - please fill out this short survey.

Editorial policies

All manuscripts submitted to Research Involvement and Engagement should adhere to BioMed Central's editorial policies.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Citing articles in Research Involvement and Engagement

Articles in Research Involvement and Engagement  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. Res Involv Engagem [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. Res Involv Engagem 2009, 1:115.

refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Appeals and complaints

Authors who wish to appeal a rejection or make a complaint should follow the procedure outlined in the BMC Editorial Policies.

Benefits of publishing with BMC

High visibility

Research Involvement and Engagement'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

Research Involvement and Engagement 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 Research Involvement and Engagement 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 Research Involvement and Engagement are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be highlighted on Research Involvement and Engagement’s pages and on the BMC homepage.

In addition, articles published in Research Involvement and Engagement 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 Research Involvement and Engagement. A list of articles recently press-released by journals published by BMC is available here.

Copyright

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

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

Annual Journal Metrics

  • 2022 Citation Impact
    1.424 - SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper)
    0.854 - SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)

    2023 Speed
    2 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median)
    120 days submission to accept (Median)

    2023 Usage 
    674,195 downloads
    3,119 Altmetric mentions