Introducing the Physiome journal

Physiome publishes reproducible and reusable mathematical models of physiological processes where the experimental details and model validation have been published or accepted for publication in a recognised 'primary' peer-reviewed journal. Physiome is open access with a low Author Processing Charge. Where possible, models can be displayed (in mathematical form and in various programming languages) and run directly from the journal website with freely available open source software.

Physiome can be found online at journal.physiomeproject.org.

Figshare publication platform

Physiome makes use of the Figshare platform in two ways. The first is that Figshare is used to publish and distribute Physiome articles, ensuring each article has a persistent and resolvable DOI (see physiome.figshare.com). This also enables the collection of various metrics tracking things like article views, downloads, social media mentions, etc. that will help us to provide an indication of the impact a model published in Physiome is having, in addition to the traditional impact measurements associated with the primary paper.

The second way Figshare is used is as the submission portal for authors to submit their work to Physiome for evaluation. The submission portal is available at: https://physiome.figshare.com/submit. See the author instructions for the details on creating and submitting your work to Physiome.

Physiome articles

Articles published in Physiome consist of two items, both available via the Figshare platform. The first is a PDF document describing the model, modelling assumptions, limitations, provenance, etc. The second is a COMBINE archive file which contains all the model and simulation files required to produce the model predictions provided in the PDF, as well as those linked back to the primary paper.

The COMBINE archive has its own DOI provided by the Figshare platform and should be downloaded for use in desktop tools as the starting point for reusing an existing model that is relevant to your work. If the model requires the use of a tool or application which does not support COMBINE archives natively, the archive can by extracted using standard ZIP tools, which are natively supported on most operating systems.

Physiome management board

Professor Denis Noble, IUPS President; Professor Emeritus, Oxford University

Professor Walter Boron, IUPS Secretary General; Chair, Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, USA

Professor Andrew McCulloch, Chair IUPS Physiome Committee; Bioengineering Department, University of California San Diego

Professor Stig Omholt, Representative of VPH Institute Board; Research Director, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Professor Peter Hunter, EiC Physiome; Director, Auckland Bioengineering Institute, University of Auckland