About Cell Genomics

Cell Genomics

Cell Genomics is a gold open access journal from Cell Press, the life-sciences imprint of Elsevier, publishing multidisciplinary research at the intersection of genomics and the life sciences. Its online ISSN is 2666-979X — it is an online-only title with no print ISSN — and it began publishing in 2021, with its first issue dated 13 October 2021. Every article it publishes is immediately and permanently free to read and download, financed by an article publishing charge rather than by subscriptions. In a field where the established titles were either society journals, subscription flagships or methods journals, Cell Genomics was launched to be something specific: a high-profile, fully open home for work that characterises, interprets or functionally interrogates genomes, whether the contribution is a discovery, a resource, a technology or a dataset that other researchers will build on.

The journal's founding editor-in-chief, Orli G. Bahcall, set out that ambition in a launch editorial in the first issue. Her background, as recorded in that editorial, spans more than seventeen years of editorial work, including as genetics and genomics editor at Nature and Nature Genetics and as chief editor of Nature Reviews Genetics, with a doctorate in epidemiology and mathematical modelling from Imperial College London. That pedigree matters for understanding the journal: it was built by an editor who had run genetics publishing at the highest level, and its policies — an insistence that datasets and code be available at submission, encouragement of preprints, an option for transparent peer review — read as a deliberate attempt to import the best practices she had championed elsewhere into a new, open access setting.

Aims and scope

The journal's own aims and scope statement is short and should be quoted in substance: it is a gold open access journal providing a high-profile forum for major advances in genetics, genomics and genome technology, and their applications in the basic, molecular, biomedical, clinical and social sciences. It aims to bring together diverse communities in the shared goals of advancing genomics and its impact on biomedical science, precision medicine, and global and ecological health. It is multidisciplinary in scope, covering the full range of research, resources, methods and technology involved with characterising, interpreting or functionally interrogating genomes. Alongside primary research manuscripts of various lengths and formats, it publishes expert analysis, commentary and reviews on topics of current interest, explicitly to facilitate dialogue across communities that do not normally read each other's journals.

Cell Press organises the journal's content into collections, and the collection list is the most concrete map of the scope in practice. It includes bioinformatics and computational biology; cancer genomics; chromosomes; CRISPR applications; disease genetics and epidemiology; DNA variants, structural variants, copy-number variants, quantitative trait loci and individual variation; epigenetics; evolution; functional genomics; gene regulation; genomics of underrepresented populations; genome-wide association studies and similar analyses; immunogenomics; long-read sequencing; metagenomics; organismal genomics; policy; polygenic risk scores; population genetics and cross-ancestry analyses; proteomics; RNA biology and the transcriptome; spatial transcriptomics and single-cell biology; synthetic biology; and variant functional studies. The topic list recorded in the journal's aims — human genetics, cancer genomics, precision medicine, genome technology, single-cell genomics, genome editing, computational genomics, functional genomics, comparative genomics, agricultural genetics, population and evolutionary genetics, and genetics and society — adds the agricultural and societal ends of the spectrum that the collections list understates.

Scope in detail

Human and disease genetics. The core of the journal: association studies, rare-variant and family studies, disease-gene discovery, and the epidemiology that connects genotype to phenotype at population scale. The presence of a dedicated collection for genomics of underrepresented populations, and another for cross-ancestry analysis, reflects an editorial position — that a genomics journal publishing mostly European-ancestry studies would be building its resources on a biased base — rather than a passive reflection of what is submitted.

Resources, datasets and technology. Unusually for a selective journal, a dataset, an atlas, a reference resource or a sequencing or analysis technology can be the paper, provided it has current utility for the community and paves the way for future work. The journal's launch-era primer on the life cycle of genomics data — how data are generated, structured, stored and shared — signals how seriously it takes the resource genre. Authors of resource papers should note the corollary in the journal's stated editorial practice: datasets and software or code must be made available with the initial submission, so that they can be vetted as part of review, not promised for later.

Functional and single-cell genomics. Work that moves from association to mechanism — functional interrogation of variants, CRISPR screens and editing, gene regulation, chromatin, single-cell and spatial methods — forms the journal's second pillar. OpenAlex's topic analysis of the journal's record independently shows genetic associations and epidemiology, genomics and chromatin dynamics, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, and chromosomal and genetic variations among its leading topics, which matches the stated scope closely.

Population, evolutionary and organismal genomics. Population genetics, evolutionary analyses including ancient DNA, comparative genomics and the genomics of non-model organisms extend the journal beyond human biomedicine, as do metagenomics and microbiome work and agricultural genetics. The journal's framing goal of ecological as well as biomedical health gives these strands a stated place rather than a tolerated one.

Genetics and society. Policy, ethics and the social consequences of genomics — consent, return of results, ancestry inference, the use of polygenic scores — are in scope as commentary and analysis, not only as discussion-section material. For a journal whose subject is human genomes, that inclusion is a considered part of the design.

Editorial model and open science policies

The publisher states that the journal is committed to open science and transparency in the editorial, review and publishing process. In practical terms, as described in its author information: sharing of initial manuscripts through preprint servers is encouraged, and a direct submission route from bioRxiv and medRxiv is offered; rapid sharing of data and software is encouraged, and datasets and code are required to be available with the initial submission so reviewers can examine them; and authors are offered the option of transparent peer review, so readers can follow the editorial and review process from first submission through to publication. The journal's DOAJ record adds the formal details: single anonymous peer review as the recorded review model, plagiarism detection in place, persistent identifiers through DOIs, and long-term preservation through CLOCKSS, PubMed Central and Portico.

Those policies have real consequences for authors. A submission whose data cannot yet be shared is not ready for this journal, however interesting the result. A team that has posted a preprint can move it across directly rather than reformatting from scratch. And a team weighing the transparent review option should decide early, because it changes what correspondence may later become public. The DOAJ record also records a waiver policy through the publisher and a publication-time figure of thirty-four weeks, which sits in obvious tension with the publisher's own much faster medians — five days to a first editorial decision and twenty-eight days from acceptance to online publication, with an older insights page reporting a hundred and sixty-five days from submission to acceptance. The sensible reading is that these figures measure different things across different periods; authors planning around a grant or a thesis deadline should rely on the journal's current stated medians and on direct enquiry, not on any single number in a directory record.

Metrics, and a correction that matters

Cell Press currently displays, on the journal's own page, an Impact Factor of 8.4, identified as from Journal Citation Reports 2025 (Clarivate Analytics, 2026), and a CiteScore of 14.6, identified as the 2025 CiteScore. An earlier version of the publisher's insights data gave an Impact Factor of 9.0 and a CiteScore of 11.1. That earlier pair is the source of an error worth correcting explicitly, because it lives in the older Journals World template for this record: the template presented 11.1 as the journal's Impact Factor. Eleven point one was its CiteScore, not its Impact Factor; the two measures are computed differently — CiteScore over a four-year window of peer-reviewed documents in Scopus, the Impact Factor over a two-year window in the Web of Science — and printing one under the other's name misstates the journal's standing in both directions over time. Readers comparing this journal with others should use the current, correctly labelled pair: Impact Factor 8.4, CiteScore 14.6.

For a journal launched in 2021, the OpenAlex record — 721 works and more than fifteen thousand citations, with an h-index of 58 — shows how quickly a well-positioned open access title in a fast field accumulates a citation base, helped by the fact that everything it publishes is free to read and therefore free to cite without a subscription barrier. One field of that record should not be used: its earliest-publication-year value predates the journal's 2021 launch and conflicts with the publisher's and DOAJ's records, both of which place the start in 2021. The launch date in this profile rests on those two sources, including the dated first issue in PubMed Central, not on the database field. The older Journals World template also reported an h-index of 41 for this journal — an earlier snapshot of a growing record, superseded by the figure retrieved here — and, as noted, mislabelled its CiteScore as an Impact Factor.

Indexing, charges and who should submit

The publisher's insights page records the journal's abstracting and indexing as including Scopus, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and PubMed Central, with SCImago and SNIP metrics derived from the Scopus base. Its DOAJ listing, verified directly for this profile, confirms the essentials a funder's open access office will ask about: gold open access from 2021, publisher Elsevier in the United States, article processing charge with a maximum of USD 8,900, Creative Commons licence options, preservation arrangements and a waiver policy. The charge itself is at the high end of the market, as Cell Press states it plainly on the journal page: an article publishing charge of USD 8,900, met by the authors or their research funders for each article published. Institutional agreements and publisher waivers may cover it in particular cases, but a team without an agreement or grant line for the charge should settle the funding question before submission, not after acceptance.

The journal suits authors whose work is a genuine advance in genetics or genomics with demonstrable utility beyond their own group — a resource the community will use, a technology that changes what can be measured, a genetic finding robust enough to redirect a field — and who need or want full, immediate open access with a fast, professionally run editorial process. It is less suitable for incremental studies, for work whose data cannot be shared at submission, and for teams whose findings belong in a specialist society journal read by exactly the community that will use them. Authors should also weigh the journal's breadth honestly: a paper here is judged partly on interest across the diverse communities the journal exists to connect, and a technically strong but narrowly framed manuscript may be advised that it belongs elsewhere.

Preparing a submission: what the journal's policies mean in practice

Three of the journal's stated policies should shape a manuscript long before it is submitted. First, the data and code requirement: because datasets and software must be available with the initial submission for vetting during review, the repository deposits, accession numbers and code releases are part of the submission itself, and a team that treats them as post-acceptance housekeeping will find its manuscript incomplete. Second, the preprint route: the journal encourages posting on preprint servers and offers direct transfer from bioRxiv and medRxiv, so a team can gather community comment and establish its record early without restarting the submission process — a route that also suits the resource and atlas papers the journal wants, whose value grows the sooner the community can use them. Third, the transparent peer review option: deciding for or against it is an editorial-process choice with lasting consequences, since a published article may carry its review history with it, and co-authors should agree the choice before submission rather than at proof stage. Finally, the journal's collections — including several run jointly with other Cell Press titles, marked as multi-journal collections on the journal's page — are worth checking before submission, because a manuscript that fits an open collection gains a defined readership and context on publication, and the editorial office can advise whether a planned submission matches a collection in preparation.

Strengths, limits and verification notes

The journal's strengths are its open access completeness, its editorial leadership and policies on data, code and transparency, its speed as reported in its own medians, and a scope that treats resources and technology as first-class contributions. Its limits are the high publishing charge, the selectivity that comes with a high-profile forum, and its youth: a title launched in 2021 has a shorter track record than the century-old genetics journals it competes with, and its metrics, while strong, are still those of a journal in its first decade.

On the Journals World record itself, the ISSN shown in the structured data (2666979X) is correct, and the publisher shown there — Cell Press, United States — is correct as the imprint, with Elsevier recorded as the publisher in the journal's DOAJ record. The template text printed the imprint's internal record number where a publisher name belonged, reported an h-index from an earlier snapshot, and, most importantly, presented the journal's CiteScore of 11.1 as its Impact Factor. This profile corrects the label and updates both figures from the publisher's current page. Verification for any of the facts here should start from the Cell Press journal page, the journal's DOAJ record, and the ISSN-matched OpenAlex source record cited above.

Frequently asked questions

What is the ISSN of Cell Genomics? Online ISSN 2666-979X. It is an online-only journal with no print ISSN.

Who publishes it, and when did it start? Cell Press, the Elsevier imprint, in the United States. It launched in 2021; its first issue is dated 13 October 2021, and its founding editor-in-chief was Orli G. Bahcall.

Is it fully open access? Yes. It is a gold open access journal: all articles are immediately and permanently free to read and download, and it is listed in DOAJ, with open access recorded from 2021.

What does it charge? An article publishing charge of USD 8,900 per published article, per Cell Press and the DOAJ record, subject to any institutional agreement or waiver that applies to the authors.

What are its Impact Factor and CiteScore? Impact Factor 8.4 (Journal Citation Reports 2025) and CiteScore 14.6 (2025), as displayed by Cell Press. Note that 11.1, sometimes quoted as its Impact Factor, was an earlier CiteScore.

What does it publish? Major advances in genetics, genomics and genome technology and their applications across the basic, molecular, biomedical, clinical and social sciences — research, resources, methods and technology, plus expert analysis, commentary and reviews.