October 17, 2023
When you publish with BPI, you reach nearly 100,000 global readers working in all phases of biopharmaceutical development and manufacturing. If you have a topic that you want to develop into an article, or if you are seeking a “home” for a manuscript, contact managing editor Brian Gazaille ([email protected]). He can let you know of our interest and potential publication timelines. We are happy to respond to drafts, but unsolicited manuscripts are welcome.
What We Publish
“Focus On . . . ” (nontechnical) articles of ~1,500–3,000 words explore regulatory trends, business issues, risk management strategies, industry training, bioethics, and other topics relevant to the biopharmaceutical industry.
Peer-reviewed (technical) articles usually run ~2,000–5,000 words. These are the “meat” of the magazine, providing specialist-level analyses on biomanufacturing and drug development for a breadth of biotherapeutics. Such articles may be detailed case studies, descriptions of industry “best practice,” or technical literature reviews. Important topics include fermentation and cell culture, cell-line development, separation and purification, formulation and fill–finish, information technology, analytical methods and assay development, process automation and analytics, process validation, and quality systems.
“Elucidation” articles are 500–700-word guest commentaries, book reviews, and letters to the editor.
Our editors will determine the best classification for your manuscript. We also can help determine whether it would fit nicely into an upcoming Featured Report supplement (print and online) or eBook (online only).
Manuscript Submission
Email manuscripts to managing editor Brian Gazaille ([email protected]) as a Microsoft Word document.
Please number references in call-out order (repeated only by number) without using automatic referencing. Don’t worry especially about formatting your references, but please include the following information, if available:
• your source’s full title
• names of all listed authors
• title of the book or periodical that houses your source
• publication information (for books, list the publishing house, its location, and publication date; for periodicals, include volume and issue numbers, publication date, and complete page numbers)
• URL or DOI link.
We encourage you to include graphics (photos, figures, illustrations) and/or tables. These should be numbered, captioned, and called out in your text. Tables should be editable in a Word document. Please submit the rest as separate attachments and in high-resolution form (~300 dpi, at least two inches wide) saved as EPS, JPG, PNG, TIFF, or Adobe file formats. We also welcome images that can serve as cover art. Contact senior technical editor Cheryl Scott ([email protected]) for more information about cover-art specifications.
Our Process at a Glance
Assuming a favorable peer review, publication typically is three or more months after submission of technical papers. It usually takes about two months for nontechnical articles. An editor will acknowledge receipt of your manuscript, then initiate internal/external review and keep you apprised of its progress.
Technical papers usually are reviewed by two editorial advisors, which may take two to six weeks. Reviewers rarely accept a manuscript without making a few suggestions for improvement, and we will work with you to negotiate a revision schedule if needed. Sometimes it can be simply part of our copyediting process.
Once your paper is accepted, we’ll give you an approximate publication schedule. About a month before publication, an editor will copyedit and lay out the manuscript in a BPI template, then send you a galley proof on which you can note any changes that you would like to make. We expect the galley-review process to be highly collaborative, enabling you to present your insights as accurately and effectively as possible. Think of your copyeditor as a language consultant and readers’ advocate. We’re here to help you communicate as clearly and as succinctly as possible with people around the world who have a wide range of biopharmaceutical experience, knowledge, and expertise.
Production and Publication: Once your contribution is finalized, your editor will send it to our production manager. She might insert fractional advertisements, which can alter our layouts. During a final series of checks, editors review all of an issue’s pages again, making small changes as necessary.
Once the issue is printed and files have been uploaded to our website (usually midmonth), our associate editor will send you a finalized PDF for your personal use and a link to the online version of your contribution. The easiest way to receive a printed copy of your article is to subscribe to BPI here: https://inf.dragonforms.com/INF2_BCnew&pk=wb2018.
The Legal Stuff
Registration Marks: Following general legal requirements and editorial approaches, BPI does not use trade or service marks in editorial content. For the best protection of such valuable property, we edit product names to appear as capitalized adjectives that modify generic nouns (e.g., Kleenex tissue). We substitute generic terms for trade names wherever possible. Upon request, we can provide resources for proper use of trademark and registration symbols in technical publications.
Copyrights: Upon manuscript acceptance, we send you a PDF describing our copyright policy. After your contribution has been published, we encourage you to include your own personal PDF in academic and other repositories (e.g., PubMed Central and the NIH manuscript-submission system). You also might wish to post a summary and link to your article on a social network such as LinkedIn.
For mass-communications and public-relations purposes, however, we ask that authors direct audiences to the BPI website rather than hosting personal PDFs directly on their own companies’ websites. That prevents “versionitis” online and helps search engines find our content. Authors and their companies retain copyrights to their originally submitted materials. Thus, you may reuse your original text and graphics — but not the edited BPI layout — in an anthology, conference presentation, or other such venue. BPI appreciates a reference in those subsequent materials.
For other ways to share your BPI publication in a PDF or professionally printed format, please contact Mossberg and Company ([email protected]). Circumstances can differ for some contributions, and we can discuss copyright variations case by case.
Copyediting
At BPI, we still believe that copyediting is important for concision and clarity, especially with a multilingual audience, so our editors provide this service for free. The goal of good copyediting is to help you communicate best with as many readers as possible. For example, your editor might divide long sentences into manageable “bites” or condense wordy phrases. We often eliminate generic phrases (“in my opinion”) and replace ambiguous statements with more precise terms (e.g., using “since the 1990s” rather than “since the early years of the biopharmaceutical industry”).
Most manuscripts are edited to fit within our layout specifications, as well. We might condense or reformat a title and subtitle to fit within available space. Doing so also serves to optimize your article for online archiving. An editor will check your references to ensure that readers can access them.
BPI House Style: BPI primarily follows The ACS Style Guide. Grammar, style, citation, and notation conventions therein apply across many disciplines that are relevant to our readers. Other resources that guide our copyediting of your article include Webster’s Third International Dictionary, The Gregg Reference Manual, and The Chicago Manual of Style.
To ensure consistency of voice and identity across our issues and volumes, we also edit according to internally developed conventions. So BPI style might differ from what is used in your company’s publications and in other periodicals. In a global industry, even what is considered a “standard” format can vary across companies and publications. Please trust that we will help you to frame your article according to carefully considered conventions developed through decades of familiarity with the biopharmaceutical industry. Below are some of our most pertinent formatting and stylistic conventions.
Primarily for consistency, BPI uses American English rather than British spelling, defaulting to standard spellings and first-entry definitions of words rather than nonstandard usage.
When appropriate, we prefer active voice over passive — despite the conventions of laboratory notebooks. If readers want to reproduce your work, then they will appreciate knowing, for example, how many people your team needed for a specific step in a process and who needed to do what.
We also prefer using first-person (I, we, my, our) and sometimes second-person (you, your) perspectives rather than overly formal and distancing third-person constructions (one, it, there is). This approach facilitates the exchange of practical information.
BPI pays strict attention to correct uses of demonstrative and relative pronouns: e.g., this and that, these and those, and which and that. Our readers are busy, so we don’t want them to waste time stumbling over ambiguities. Thus, since (referring to time) is not used in place of because (causality), and while is not used to mean although.
BPI often defines and abbreviates key terms because acronyms can stand for different concepts across disciplines and might be unfamiliar to readers who are new to the industry. For example, we still use “CGMP” to abbreviate current good manufacturing practice, following the US Food and Drug Administration’s early lead in capitalizing the “C.” (Although often used in biopharmaceutical industry discourse, the similar abbreviation cGMP can be confused to mean cyclic guanosine monophosphate in some contexts.)
For an international audience, clarity is key. Among our general punctuation and typographic practices, we use the Oxford comma before the final “and” in a list. We follow standard hyphenation guidelines and make proper typographical use of en and em dashes. We italicize terms that are defined in text, reserving quotation marks for spoken/written remarks, neologisms, and idioms. Following ACS style, we do not italicize familiar Latin terms (e.g., in vivo) or hyphenate them when they are used as adjectives (e.g., in vitro methods).
Making Personal Connections
Because BPI editors serve in a consulting capacity, it’s best for us to communicate directly with authors rather than their representatives. A byline is a professional achievement that deserves the author’s close, personal attention. We are excited to work with you!
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