Cell Discovery

About Cell Discovery

Cell Discovery: profile and journal guide

Cell Discovery is an open access international journal in molecular and cell biology. Its own journal information page, published by Springer Nature, describes it as a journal that “publishes results of high significance and broad interest in all areas of molecular and cell biology”, says it was established in 2015, and presents it as a sister journal of the high-profile international journal Cell Research. This profile is anchored to the JournalsWorld record for post 1852, slug cell-discovery, whose stored identifiers give a single electronic ISSN, 2056-5968, with the same number as ISSN-L. There is no separate print ISSN in the sources consulted for this profile, and readers should not invent one: the journal is an online open access title, and 2056-5968 is the identifier to use when matching it in catalogues, in the ISSN record, in the Directory of Open Access Journals and in citation databases. The publisher named on the stored record is Springer Nature, the publisher country code is GB, and the journal is published in partnership with the Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. That combination of a London-based international publisher and a Chinese Academy partner institution explains much of the journal's character: it is simultaneously a Springer Nature portfolio title, with the portfolio's standard editorial, production and open access machinery, and a journal rooted in a major Chinese cell science institute, with a sponsoring learned society alongside it.

A note on names and on what this journal is not will help readers match records correctly. Cell Discovery is not Cell Research, although it is deliberately positioned as that journal's sister. It is not Cell Death & Discovery, a different Springer Nature open access title with a narrower cell death remit, and it is not the journal Cells published by another publisher. Several titles in this family of names share editors, article types and web design, so the ISSN is the reliable discriminator. Whenever a catalogue entry, a metrics table or a library list is ambiguous, the check is simple: eISSN 2056-5968 means Cell Discovery; any other ISSN means a different publication, however similar the name looks. The JournalsWorld stored record passes that check cleanly, and the Directory of Open Access Journals record retrieved for this profile returns the same title, the same eISSN and a compatible publisher and partnership picture.

History and sponsorship

The journal's launch was announced in an editorial titled “Cell Discovery: a new publishing experience”, published online on 28 April 2015 and now held in PubMed Central. The launch editorial records that the journal was co-sponsored at launch by the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and more specifically by its Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology and the Shanghai Information Center for Life Sciences, together with the Chinese Society for Cell Biology, and that it was jointly published with Nature Publishing Group. The journal's current information page updates the sponsorship wording, naming the Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences as co-sponsor alongside the Chinese Society for Cell Biology. Readers comparing older and newer descriptions should therefore not treat the difference as a contradiction: institute names and structures within the Chinese Academy have been reorganised since 2015, and the publisher's current page is the one to quote for the present partnership, while the 2015 editorial is the primary source for how the journal began.

The launch editorial also explains the editorial inheritance the new journal claimed. Its editorial team was led at launch by Professors Gang Pei and Dangsheng Li, as Editor and Executive Editor, who also headed Cell Research, and the editorial presented the new open access title as perfectly positioned to inherit the professional scientific editor team, the international board and the community support that had made its elder sister prominent. That positioning matters for authors a decade later, because Cell Discovery was never presented as a low-barrier repository for work that could not find a home elsewhere. From its first editorial it asked for results of significance and originality, and its current journal information page still uses the language of high significance and broad interest. The current editorial leadership named by the publisher is Dr Lin Li, who leads the editorial team according to the journal information page retrieved for this profile; editorial boards in this portfolio change over time, so anyone who needs the board as it stands on a particular day should read the publisher's own editorial board page rather than relying on any directory summary, including this one.

Growth since 2015 is visible in the usage and citation figures the publisher itself reports, which are discussed in the metrics section below. The recorded coverage on the JournalsWorld record runs from 2015 to 2026, which matches a journal founded in 2015 and still publishing. Nothing in the official sources consulted suggests a title change, a split or a cessation, and the Directory of Open Access Journals record was still being fully reviewed as recently as the review date carried in that record, 17 March 2026 in the underlying record data retrieved through the DOAJ search API. That is a useful freshness signal: a ceased or abandoned journal does not normally carry a current full review in the directory.

Aims, scope and subject coverage

The scope is molecular and cell biology in the broad sense, and the launch editorial's own list remains a good map of the territory: cell growth and differentiation, signal transduction, apoptosis, chromatin modulation, epigenetics, transcriptional regulation, stem cell research, development, immunology, neurosciences and plant cell biology. The DOAJ record's keyword list is a shorter version of the same map, naming cell growth and differentiation, signal transduction, apoptosis, stem cells, immunology and cell development, and its subject classification places the journal under Cytology in the Library of Congress scheme used by the directory. The SCImago categories carried on the JournalsWorld record are consistent with that breadth, placing the journal in Biochemistry, Cell Biology, Genetics and Molecular Biology, all at Q1 in the 2025 dataset. A journal classified across those four categories is not a niche techniques journal and not a disease-specific clinical title; it sits at the centre of basic life science, and papers are expected to speak to readers beyond a single sub-specialty.

In practical terms, the work that fits this journal is work that changes how readers understand a cellular or molecular mechanism, a pathway, a developmental process or a molecular interaction, and that can explain why the finding matters outside the system in which it was observed. Studies of RNA modification and cancer, of epigenetic regulation, of CRISPR-based genetic engineering and of host responses to infection have all appeared prominently in the research topics that aggregators extract from the journal's published output, and the JournalsWorld record's own topic list, drawn from OpenAlex, names SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 research, RNA modifications and cancer, CRISPR and genetic engineering, epigenetics and DNA methylation, RNA research and splicing, and COVID-19 clinical research studies among the topics found in its works. Those extracted topics are not the publisher's official aims and scope, and this profile does not present them as such; they are evidence of what the journal has in fact published and cited heavily, which is a different and useful kind of evidence for an author judging fit. A manuscript about a purely descriptive local observation, with no mechanistic advance and no argument for broader significance, is a poor fit for a journal whose own description insists on high significance and broad interest, whatever its laboratory quality.

Article forms follow the standard pattern of a Springer Nature research journal: original research articles are the core, accompanied by reviews, reports and editorial material. The launch editorial promised results of significance and originality across the scope, and the publisher's author guidance for the title, linked from its DOAJ record, is the authoritative document for article categories, formatting, data and code expectations and supplementary material. Authors should read the current version of that guidance before submission rather than relying on the formatting of a paper they downloaded, because portfolio guidance is revised and the version attached to an older article may no longer describe what the submission system asks for today.

Editorial process, peer review and speed

The Directory of Open Access Journals record retrieved for this profile states the review process as single anonymous peer review, records that plagiarism detection is in place, and links the journal's review and author guidance documents held on the publisher's site. Single anonymous review, in which reviewers know the authors' identities but authors do not know the reviewers', is the standard model across much of this publisher's life science portfolio, and authors should write their cover materials and their responses accordingly. The publisher's journal information page gives two speed figures that authors quote often, and they should be quoted exactly as the publisher presents them: a median of 7 days from submission to first editorial decision, and a median of 160 days from submission to acceptance, both as reported on that page when retrieved for this profile. The first figure is an editorial screening figure, not a peer review figure; a manuscript can receive a first editorial decision in a week because it has been declined without external review or sent forward, and neither outcome is a promise about the second figure. The 160-day median to acceptance includes author revision time, which is partly in the authors' own hands.

The DOAJ record separately reports a publication time of 20 weeks on average. That figure, and the publisher's medians, describe different segments of a pipeline measured by different organisations, so this profile does not combine them into a single promised timetable, and no author should plan a grant report, a thesis deposit or a priority claim around any of them. What the combined evidence does support is a narrower, useful statement: this is an actively edited journal with professional scientific editors, a documented review model, plagiarism screening, and published median timings that a prospective author can compare, like for like, with the published medians of competing titles. Where a figure could not be verified from the sources in hand, this profile says so rather than filling the gap; the journal's acceptance rate, for example, is not published in the sources consulted, and it is therefore described here as not publicly disclosed rather than estimated from third-party sites.

Open access, licensing and charges

Cell Discovery is a fully open access journal. Its DOAJ record states that open access content dates from 2015, which in that record is the journal's starting position rather than a later conversion, that the licence is CC BY, that authors retain unrestricted copyright, that there are no other charges beyond the article processing charge, and that a waiver policy exists. The same record gives the article processing charge as a maximum in three currencies: 3,090 EUR, 3,690 USD and 2,690 GBP. Those are the DOAJ-recorded figures retrieved through the DOAJ search API for this profile. They are not a personal quotation: taxes, institutional agreements, currency at the date of acceptance and the publisher's current price list can all change what a particular author is invoiced, and Springer Nature's open access agreements with institutions cover charges for eligible authors at many universities. The correct use of the figures here is budgeting and comparison; the correct source for the amount that will actually be charged is the publisher's current open access page for the journal, checked at submission and again at acceptance.

Preservation is recorded in the DOAJ record as PubMed Central, which matches the journal's presence in that archive and its indexing in PubMed Central named by the publisher. Articles carry DOIs, the record confirms a persistent identifier scheme, and the language of publication is English. For research assessment and funder compliance, the combination that matters is the one documented here: immediate open access, a CC BY licence, author copyright retention, a stated waiver policy and preservation in a recognised archive. Authors whose funders require a particular licence wording or a particular repository deposit should still check their own funder's conditions against the publisher's current open access page, because funder requirements change and a directory record, however recent, is a summary rather than the contract an author signs at acceptance.

Indexing and bibliometric standing

The publisher states that the journal is abstracted and indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded, also known as SciSearch, PubMed Central, Journal Citation Reports Science Edition, Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS Previews and the Directory of Open Access Journals. That list, from the journal's own information page, is the indexing claim this profile relies on; longer lists on third-party sites were not adopted where they could not be matched to a publisher or directory source in hand. The DOAJ claim in particular is independently confirmed by the DOAJ search API result retrieved for this profile, which returned exactly one record for ISSN 2056-5968, titled Cell Discovery, so the journal's DOAJ listing is stated here on the basis of a direct directory response, not on the basis of a badge copied from another website.

For citation standing, the publisher's journal information page reports, under the heading Citation Impact, a Journal Impact Factor of 16.9 for 2025, a five-year Journal Impact Factor of 16.3 for 2025, a Source Normalized Impact per Paper of 2.419 for 2025 and a SCImago Journal Rank of 4.879 for 2025. The JournalsWorld stored record independently carries the same SJR figure, 4.879, for 2025, an H-index of 77 attributed to SCImago 2025, Q1 placement, and coverage of 2015 to 2026, with 104 documents and 3,688 citations across the latest three-year reporting window in that dataset. Authors should note the division of labour between these numbers: the Journal Impact Factor belongs to Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports, the SJR and the SCImago H-index belong to SCImago's Scopus-based calculations, and SNIP belongs to a different normalisation again. They are not interchangeable, and a journal profile that mixes a figure from one system with a quartile from another without naming the system is misleading. This profile names the system for every figure it reports. A separate OpenAlex source record queried directly for this profile returned about 1,080 works, about 53,099 citations by count and summary statistics including an H-index of 99; those OpenAlex numbers differ from the SCImago numbers because OpenAlex counts a different corpus with different rules, and they are reported here only to show that difference, not as a rival headline metric. OpenAlex counts also move as the corpus is rebuilt, so the exact totals should be treated as a retrieval-date snapshot.

Usage figures underline the open access audience: the publisher reports 3,060,593 downloads for 2025 usage and 982 Altmetric mentions on the same information page. Download counts are publisher platform counts, not audited readership, and this profile presents them in those terms. Taken together with a 2025 impact factor in the high teens as reported by the publisher, the picture is of a journal that, a decade after launch, sits in the first rank of general molecular and cell biology titles by the measures its own publisher chooses to display, while still being younger and smaller in total archive volume than the long-established titles it competes with. That youth is relevant context for its H-index: an H-index built over a publishing history that began in 2015 is not directly comparable with the H-index of a journal that has published since the nineteen seventies.

Who should submit, and how to judge fit

The natural author for this journal is a laboratory with a completed, mechanistically substantial finding in molecular or cell biology, a story that can be told as an advance rather than as an increment, and a need for immediate open access visibility. Sister-journal positioning means some manuscripts arrive after consideration elsewhere in the publisher's cell biology family, and there is no stigma in that route, but authors submitting directly should apply the same significance test the launch editorial announced. Before submitting, read a recent issue rather than a single downloaded paper, check whether the journal has published work on your system and your method in the last two years, confirm that your data availability, ethics approvals and reporting summaries match the publisher's current author guidance, and budget for the article processing charge or confirm an institutional agreement or waiver route in advance. Confirm as well that the work is in English to the standard the journal publishes, because the record is clear that English is the language of publication.

Readers and librarians should use this journal differently from authors. For a reader, its archive from 2015 onward is a freely accessible, peer reviewed record of a decade of molecular cell biology, preserved in PubMed Central, and searchable by DOI at article level. For a librarian or research manager verifying the title, the stable facts are the ones assembled here: title Cell Discovery, eISSN 2056-5968, publisher Springer Nature in partnership with the Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, co-sponsor the Chinese Society for Cell Biology, open access from 2015 under CC BY, and indexing as listed by the publisher. Any catalogue entry that attaches a print ISSN, a different publisher or a subscription access model to this title should be treated as a mismatched record and checked against the ISSN and the publisher page before it is relied on.

Verification notes and frequently asked questions

Several points in this profile were checked against more than one source and agreed: the eISSN agrees across the JournalsWorld record, the DOAJ record and the publisher's presence; the SJR of 4.879 for 2025 agrees between the JournalsWorld record and the publisher's own metrics panel; and the founding year of 2015 agrees between the publisher's journal information page, the launch editorial and the coverage in the stored record. One point differed in wording rather than in substance: the sponsoring institute is described in 2015 language in the launch editorial and in current language on the publisher's present page, for the organisational reason explained above. No structured field conflict of the serious kind was found on this record: the stored publisher, country code and ISSN are all consistent with the official and directory sources in hand.

Is Cell Discovery open access? Yes. It is a fully open access journal, licensed CC BY according to its DOAJ record, with content openly licensed from 2015. What is its ISSN? The electronic ISSN is 2056-5968, which is also its ISSN-L. Who publishes it? Springer Nature, in partnership with the Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with the Chinese Society for Cell Biology as co-sponsor. What is its impact factor? The publisher reports a Journal Impact Factor of 16.9 for 2025 and a five-year figure of 16.3; those are the publisher's displayed Journal Citation Reports figures, distinct from the SJR of 4.879 for 2025, which is a SCImago measure. How long does review take? The publisher reports medians of 7 days to a first editorial decision and 160 days to acceptance, while DOAJ reports an average publication time of 20 weeks; none of these is a guarantee for an individual manuscript. What does it charge? The DOAJ record retrieved for this profile gives an article processing charge of 3,090 EUR, 3,690 USD or 2,690 GBP, with a waiver policy recorded; check the publisher's current page for the amount that applies to a specific acceptance. Is it the same as Cell Research? No. It is a separate journal, launched in 2015 as a sister to Cell Research, with its own ISSN and its own archive.

This profile will age in the places where all journal profiles age: editorial leadership, charges, medians and metrics are revised by the publisher and the directories, and the figures above are stated with their source and year so that a later reader can replace them cleanly. The identity facts, title, ISSN, publisher, partnership, founding year and open access model, are the stable core, and they are the facts on which this record should be matched in any catalogue.