Asian Journal of Natural Product Biochemistry

About Asian Journal of Natural Product Biochemistry

Asian Journal of Natural Product Biochemistry — Journal Profile

Asian Journal of Natural Product Biochemistry (abbreviated Asian J Nat Prod Biochem) is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal of natural product chemistry and biochemistry published in Surakarta, Indonesia, by Smujo International for the Society for Indonesian Biodiversity, in association with Universitas Sebelas Maret (Sebelas Maret University). It carries print ISSN 2775-4189 and online ISSN 2775-4197, appears twice a year, in June and December, and reached volume 24 in 2026. The journal's own site records that it was first published in 2003 under the name Biofarmasi, and its present title continues that run. Its territory is the chemistry and biological activity of natural products: bioactive compounds from land and sea, from plants, microbes and animals; antimicrobial, antiviral, antiparasitic and anticancer activity; ethnopharmacology and ethnomedicine; plant-derived drugs and their formulations; and the biochemistry, biotechnology, pharmacology, toxicology and chemical ecology of natural products. The journal states that papers published from 2021 are indexed in Scopus, publishes free of charge to readers under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence, and charges authors a stated fee of USD 250 for manuscripts submitted from October 2025.

Identity, Publisher and Setting

The journal belongs to the Surakarta biodiversity publishing community centred on the Society for Indonesian Biodiversity and Sebelas Maret University. Its publisher, Smujo International, is the publishing house that serves that society, and the journal's stated institutional home is Universitas Sebelas Maret in Surakarta, Central Java. That setting shapes the journal's content. Indonesia is one of the world's megadiverse countries, and its traditional medicine traditions — jamu in Java and hundreds of local systems beyond it — rest on exactly the plant chemistry this journal studies. A natural-products journal published from a Javanese university city, by a biodiversity society, is positioned at the junction of three literatures that often talk past one another: analytical phytochemistry, pharmacological screening, and the ethnobotanical record of how the compounds were used in the first place.

The journal's history as Biofarmasi matters for anyone tracing its record. First published in 2003 under that Indonesian-language name — biofarmasi means biopharmacy — it was renamed Asian Journal of Natural Product Biochemistry as it internationalised, taking its present ISSNs and an English-language, regional identity while keeping its volume sequence: a journal founded in 2003 reaches volume 24 in 2026, which is exactly where this title stands, with volume 24, number 2 dated 2026. Citation indexes treat the current title as its own record, and OpenAlex's coverage of the current title begins in the late 2000s; authors citing or citing-from the journal's earliest years should remember to look under the former title as well.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal's aims and scope statement is specific, and this profile follows it closely. The journal encourages manuscripts on all important contributions to natural product chemistry, including bioactive compounds of land and sea and of plants, microbes and animals; activities against microbes, viruses, parasites and cancer; ethnopharmacology, ethnomedicines and medical application; plant-derived drugs, pharmaceutical formulations and their evaluation; and the biochemistry, chemistry, biotechnology, physiology, cell structures, pharmacology, toxicology and chemical ecology of natural products. In practice that makes the journal a home for the classic natural-products workflow — collect or source the organism, extract and fractionate, characterise the compounds, and test the activity — as well as for the ethnopharmacological surveys that document traditional use and the formulation studies that carry a plant extract toward a medicine.

OpenAlex's topic analysis of the journal's output matches that scope closely. Its strongest topics are medicinal plant research; essential oils and antimicrobial activity; food and agricultural sciences; phytochemical studies and bioactivities; and phytochemicals and antioxidant activities. Those topics describe the journal's centre of gravity well: screening studies of Indonesian and wider Asian medicinal plants, essential-oil composition and activity papers, and antioxidant and phytochemical profiling are its staple content, and a manuscript that identifies compounds and demonstrates a measured biological activity in a recognised assay is squarely in scope. Pure synthetic chemistry with no natural-product connection, and clinical studies with no natural-product intervention, fall outside the stated remit.

Article Types and Editorial Expectations

The journal takes three article types, each with a stated length discipline. Research papers are original full-length manuscripts, limited to 8,000 words including tables and figures, or proportionally to the articles in the issue, with longer papers possible only by notice to the editors. Review articles are also limited to 8,000 words. Short communications should run to less than 2,500 words, except for pre-study reports, which may be longer. These limits are part of the journal's editorial identity: it is a journal of compact, complete studies rather than of very long monographic papers, and authors used to writing without a ceiling should edit to the limits before submitting rather than after.

The journal's declared standards are those of its publishing society: peer review of submissions, publication through its online journal system at smujo.id/jnpb, and a commitment to free open access stated on its front page. Its Scopus coverage from 2021, which the journal itself announces with a link to the Scopus source record, is the strongest external quality signal it carries: Scopus admission requires a journal to demonstrate regular publication, peer review, and editorial standards over a sustained period, and coverage beginning in 2021 means the journal passed that assessment after nearly two decades as Biofarmasi and its successor title. Authors should nonetheless verify the current coverage position in Scopus itself at submission time, as with any journal, since database coverage can change.

Metrics and Standing

OpenAlex records 118 works and 272 citations under the current title at the time of checking, with an H-index of 11, an i10-index of 11 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.64. Its recent output is steady: 15 works in 2024 and 12 in 2025 in the OpenAlex record, appearing in the journal's two issues a year. These are modest absolute numbers, and they understate the journal's full history in one specific way: they count only the current title's record, while the journal's life began in 2003 as Biofarmasi, whose papers sit under the former title in most databases. The two-year mean citedness of about 0.64 — average citations to recent papers — is respectable for a small regional specialist title and is the more meaningful figure for a prospective author than the raw totals.

Read in context, the journal's standing is that of an established niche title with verified indexing: more than two decades of continuous publication behind it, a university and learned-society base, Scopus coverage of its recent years as the journal announces, Crossref registration of its contents, and visibility in Google Scholar and OpenAlex. It is not a high-impact general chemistry journal and does not present itself as one; its value to authors is a specialist readership in Asian natural-products research, a genuine peer-reviewed and indexed record, and full open access for readers. Whether the journal currently holds a Directory of Open Access Journals listing could not be verified from the sources checked for this profile, and authors who need that specific credential should confirm it directly.

Access, Licensing and Fees

The journal is committed to free open access, in its own words, and the licence type is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — the Creative Commons licence that permits non-commercial sharing and adaptation with attribution, on share-alike terms. Readers pay nothing, anywhere. Authors, since a stated date, do pay: the journal's site states that authors are charged USD 250 (Rp 3,500,000), with additional charges possible for language improvement at USD 75–150 (Rp 1,000,000–2,000,000), and that manuscripts submitted before 1 October 2025 remain free of charge. That is an unusually transparent fee statement — the amount, the currency equivalents, the possible extra and the grandfathering of earlier submissions are all published on the journal's front page — and authors should budget on exactly those terms while checking the page again at submission, since fee schedules are the kind of detail journals revise.

How to Submit

Manuscripts are submitted through the journal's online system at smujo.id/jnpb, where the current issue, the archive and the journal's statements of scope, charges and licensing are published. Prepare the paper to the journal's article-type limits — research papers and reviews to 8,000 words including tables and figures, short communications under 2,500 words — and frame the work explicitly in natural-product terms: the organism and its source, the compounds or extracts characterised, and the activity or application demonstrated. Ethnopharmacological manuscripts should document the traditional-use evidence carefully, since that documentation is part of the journal's stated scope and part of what its reviewers will examine. Authors who need language improvement should note the journal's published charges for that service when planning their submission, and everyone should confirm the current fee position on the journal site, given the change the journal announced for submissions from October 2025.

The Journal in Its Field

Natural product biochemistry sits between chemistry, pharmacy and biodiversity science, and this journal's position in that triangle is distinctive. The big international titles in the field — the long-established phytochemistry and ethnopharmacology journals — draw global submissions and set global agendas, but the primary screening literature for a megadiverse country's flora has to be published somewhere closer to the specimens, the traditional knowledge holders and the laboratories doing the extractions. The Asian Journal of Natural Product Biochemistry is one of the venues doing that work for Indonesia and its region: the essential oil of a Javanese plant, the antimicrobial screening of a marine organism from Indonesian waters, the ethnomedicine of a community whose knowledge has never been written into the scientific record. Its former life as Biofarmasi and its society-and-university ownership give it roots in that mission that a newer commercial title would lack. Judged as what it is — a regional specialist journal with two decades of continuity and Scopus coverage of its modern era — it is a coherent and legitimate place to publish Asian natural-products research.

Why This Journal Exists: Indonesia's Natural Products

The scientific case for the journal starts with the archipelago itself. Indonesia spans the Wallace Line, holds a large share of the world's tropical forest and coral-reef species, and has been a source of medicines, spices and aromatics for as long as there has been trade in them — cloves, nutmeg, sandalwood and benzoin were global commodities centuries before chemistry could name their active molecules. Its traditional pharmacopoeia is correspondingly deep: jamu, the Javanese herbal tradition, is prepared and sold across the country to this day, and hundreds of ethnic communities maintain their own plant medicines. Every one of those traditions is, in chemical terms, a set of hypotheses about which organisms contain biologically active compounds — hypotheses that a journal of natural product biochemistry exists to test, characterise and record before the knowledge, and in some cases the species, are lost.

That mission explains the journal's characteristic mixture of content. Ethnopharmacological surveys document what a community uses and how; phytochemical studies isolate and identify what is in the plant; bioactivity screening — antimicrobial, antiviral, antiparasitic, anticancer, antioxidant — tests whether the extract or compound does what tradition claims; and formulation work asks whether it can become a stable, dosable product. A single journal carrying all four stages, published by a biodiversity society in the country concerned, creates a record that international journals, which tend to publish the later stages only, do not. The journal's OpenAlex topic profile — medicinal plant research first, essential oils and antimicrobial activity second — shows the pipeline working exactly as its scope statement describes.

Reading the Journal as an Author

Prospective authors can learn the journal's expectations from its published pattern. Papers are compact — the 8,000-word ceiling for full research articles is real — and they are expected to arrive at a result: a characterised compound, a measured activity with proper controls, a documented traditional use with voucher-backed identification of the material. Studies of essential oils, a staple of the journal, are expected to pair composition analysis with activity data rather than reporting composition alone. Work on Indonesian organisms is the journal's heartland, but its title is Asian, not Indonesian, and its scope statement draws its map accordingly — bioactive compounds of land and sea from across the region fall within it, provided the natural-product chemistry or biochemistry is the paper's centre.

The journal's twice-yearly rhythm also shapes authorship decisions. With issues in June and December, it cannot offer the rapid turnaround of a monthly title, and its continuous record since 2003 — under two names — suggests an editorial operation that values steadiness over speed. For a screening study, a regional ethnobotanical inventory or a formulation paper aimed at the Asian natural-products community, that trade is usually acceptable; for a result in a fast-moving race, authors will look elsewhere, as they should. What the journal returns for patience is a paper that is freely readable worldwide under a clear licence, registered with Crossref, visible in the indexes that cover the title, and placed in front of exactly the community — Indonesian and Asian natural-product researchers, pharmacognosists and biodiversity scientists — most likely to build on it.

Similar Journals

Authors choosing among venues in this field will typically compare the journal with the international phytochemistry and pharmacognosy titles above it in scale, and with regional peers beside it: Biodiversitas, the biological-diversity journal of the same Surakarta society and university community, for the organism side of natural-products work; the Indonesian journal of pharmaceutical sciences titles published by the country's pharmacy faculties; and, internationally, journals of ethnopharmacology, natural product research and medicinal plant studies. The Asian Journal of Natural Product Biochemistry's own ground — Asian natural products, their chemistry and their bioactivity, from a biodiversity-society base — is the overlap none of those quite occupies.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the journal's ISSNs? Print ISSN 2775-4189 and online ISSN 2775-4197, as shown on the journal's website.

Who publishes it? Smujo International, for the Society for Indonesian Biodiversity and Sebelas Maret University, Surakarta, Indonesia.

When did it start? First published in 2003 as Biofarmasi, according to the journal's own site; the current title continues the same volume sequence, reaching volume 24 in 2026.

How often does it appear? Twice a year, in June and December.

Is it indexed in Scopus? The journal states that papers published from 2021 are indexed by Scopus, and links to the Scopus source record; it is also registered in Crossref, visible in Google Scholar and indexed in OpenAlex. Verify live coverage in Scopus at submission time.

What does it cost to publish? The journal states an author charge of USD 250 (Rp 3,500,000), with possible language-improvement charges of USD 75–150; manuscripts submitted before 1 October 2025 remain free of charge. Reading is free under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence.

What word limits apply? Research papers and reviews up to 8,000 words including tables and figures; short communications under 2,500 words, with pre-study reports excepted.

What language does it publish in? The journal presents itself in English under its current title and publishes for an international Asian readership; its predecessor title, Biofarmasi, was the Indonesian-language name under which it began in 2003.

Is reading really free? Yes — the journal states a commitment to free open access, and articles are published under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence, so anyone may read and share them for non-commercial purposes with attribution and share-alike terms.

Does it take review articles? Yes — reviews are one of its three stated article types, subject to the same 8,000-word ceiling as research papers.

How is the journal connected to Sebelas Maret University? The university is the journal's stated institution: the journal is published by Smujo International for the Society for Indonesian Biodiversity and Sebelas Maret University, Surakarta, and the society-university community in Surakarta is the centre from which its editors and much of its authorship are drawn.