Cells

About Cells

Cells — Journal Profile

Cells is MDPI's broad-scope open access journal of cell biology, molecular biology and biophysics: an online-only title, published from Basel, Switzerland under the single electronic ISSN 2073-4409, that has grown from a quarterly launch in 2012 into one of the largest journals in its field, with more than 21,700 articles listed on its own homepage at the time of checking. It is a fully open access journal — every article free to read under a CC BY licence, funded by an article processing charge that the Directory of Open Access Journals records at CHF 2,700 — and it carries an Impact Factor of 6.0 and a CiteScore of 11.4 on MDPI's own journal statistics page. Its founding editor-in-chief, Professor Alexander E. Kalyuzhny of the University of Minnesota, has held the post since the journal's first issue. This profile was compiled in November 2026 from sources consulted directly for this record: MDPI's aims and scope, journal history, editorial board and statistics pages for Cells, its Directory of Open Access Journals listing, SCImago-derived listings, and the OpenAlex source record for its ISSN.

Key facts at a glance

• Title: Cells
• ISSN: 2073-4409 (electronic only; the journal has no print ISSN)
• Publisher: MDPI AG, Basel, Switzerland
• Founded: inaugural issue released in 2012; published as a quarterly journal at launch, now appearing semimonthly in MDPI's journal description
• Editor-in-Chief: Dr Alexander E. Kalyuzhny, Department of Neuroscience, University of Minnesota, USA — founding editor, in post 2012–present per MDPI's journal history
• Access model: fully open access; CC BY licence; authors retain copyright
• Article processing charge: CHF 2,700 (DOAJ listing)
• Impact Factor / CiteScore (MDPI journal statistics page): Impact Factor 6.0; CiteScore 11.4
• SCImago: h-index 196; SJR 1.670 in the 2024 series and 1.687 in the 2025 series (SCImago-based listings); best quartile Q1
• OpenAlex source record: 21,755 works and 612,522 citations at the time of checking; OpenAlex h-index 234; two-year mean citedness 6.94
• Editorial speed (MDPI statistics page, medians): submission to first decision 15 days; acceptance to publication 3 days
• Indexing milestones (MDPI journal history): PubMed from 2013; Science Citation Index Expanded from 2017; Scopus from 2021, with coverage backfilled to volume 1

History: a 2012 launch built for scale

Cells was announced by MDPI at the very start of the publisher's second decade, in a founding editorial that presented it as a new open access journal "combining cell biology, molecular biology and biophysics, toward an understanding of cell structure, function and interactions." The inaugural issue appeared in 2012, and the journal was published quarterly in its first years. Its editor-in-chief from the outset was Alexander E. Kalyuzhny, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota whose own research concerns opioid receptor biology; MDPI's journal history page records his tenure as 2012–present and names him founding editor, a continuity that distinguishes Cells from journals that rotate their leadership. The journal's growth since then tracks the wider expansion of open access cell biology publishing. It was indexed in PubMed from 2013, with coverage starting from its first volume; it entered the Science Citation Index Expanded in 2017, with Web of Science coverage starting from volume 3, issue 2; and it received its first Journal Impact Factor — 4.829 for 2017, announced in June 2018 — ranking 55th of 190 journals in the Cell Biology category at that time. Scopus indexing followed in 2021, backfilled to volume 1, issue 1. The journal marked its tenth anniversary in 2021, by which point it had published more than 4,000 papers; its Impact Factor peaked in that era at 7.666 for 2021, a figure MDPI itself highlighted in its anniversary coverage. Since then the journal's volume has continued to climb — its homepage listed 21,729 articles when checked for this profile — while its Impact Factor has settled to the 6.0 that MDPI currently displays. That trajectory, rapid growth followed by a moderation of the headline metric as volume rose, is the normal arithmetic of a large broad-scope journal, and it is the context in which the current figures should be read.

Scope: the whole cell, deliberately

MDPI's own statement of aims describes Cells as an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal providing "an advanced forum for studies related to cell biology, molecular biology and biophysics," publishing reviews, research articles, communications and technical notes, with an explicit editorial preference for experimental work over clinical and epidemiological studies: "our major focus is on experimental cytology rather than on clinical and epidemiological studies." The topic list is correspondingly wide — cell structure and physiology, cellular metabolism, cellular immunology, intra- and extracellular signalling, cell movement and motility, autophagy, apoptosis, cell ageing and senescence, cell techniques, cell growth and differentiation, stem cells, genetic disorders and therapy, omics, the cell biology of plants, algae and fungi, and neurodegeneration and neuroinflammation. The journal is organised into sections, each with its own section editor-in-chief drawn from the field — sections visible on the current board include Mitochondria, Cell Signaling, Cell and Gene Therapy, Cellular Biophysics and Intracellular and Plasma Membranes — and a large share of its content appears in guest-edited topical collections and special issues, the mechanism by which a very broad journal keeps its subfields coherent. OpenAlex's topic profile of the source, derived from what it actually publishes, is consistent with that scope: its leading topics include mesenchymal stem cell research, autophagy in disease and therapy, neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration mechanisms, extracellular vesicles, and cancer cell biology and metastasis.

Two features of the journal's stated policies matter to prospective authors. There is no restriction on the maximum length of papers, and full experimental and methodical detail must be provided — the journal positions itself against the compressed formats of letters journals, and supplementary files, software and full calculation detail can be deposited alongside the article. And the journal explicitly welcomes manuscripts describing research proposals and research ideas, an unusual article category that fits its forum-like self-description. Work that is primarily clinical — a treatment cohort, an epidemiological analysis — sits outside the stated centre of gravity even when its subject is cellular, and authors of such work should expect the fit question to be asked at the editorial office stage.

Metrics, read carefully

MDPI's statistics page for the journal displays an Impact Factor of 6.0 and a CiteScore of 11.4, and those are the two figures to quote first, because both come from the journal's own publisher page and both are current as displayed. The CiteScore, Scopus's citation average, being markedly higher than the Impact Factor is typical for a journal whose papers accumulate citations over a longer window than the Impact Factor's two years. SCImago's indicators, as carried in SCImago-based listings, give the journal an h-index of 196 and an SJR of 1.670 in the 2024 series (1.687 in the 2025 series), with a best quartile of Q1 in its Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology categorisation. OpenAlex, counting a broader corpus, records 21,755 works, 612,522 citations, an h-index of 234 and a two-year mean citedness of 6.94 for the source — again close to, but not the same number as, the Journal Impact Factor, because the underlying document sets differ.

The earlier short version of this Journals World record carried an Impact Factor of 6.0 and an h-index of 196. Both survive scrutiny, with sourcing attached: the 6.0 is exactly the figure MDPI displays today, and 196 is SCImago's h-index for the journal — not a universal constant, since OpenAlex computes 234 over its wider corpus. The honest summary is that Cells is a high-volume journal with citation performance comfortably in the first rank of broad cell biology titles, whose Impact Factor has moderated from its 2021 peak of 7.666 as its annual volume has grown. Authors evaluating it against narrower competitors should compare journals on the same measure from the same year's release, and should weigh its speed and openness — discussed below — alongside the metrics, since those are the terms on which this journal principally competes.

Open access terms, indexing and discoverability

Every article in Cells is open access under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, and copyright is retained by the authors — terms confirmed both by MDPI's journal pages and by its listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals, where the journal has been listed since December 2012 and its article processing charge is recorded as CHF 2,700. That combination — CC BY, author-retained copyright, a stated charge, a DOAJ listing — is the standard package that funder open access mandates typically require, and authors with such mandates can verify compliance directly from the DOAJ record. On discoverability, the journal's indexing milestones in its own history are the authoritative account: PubMed coverage from 2013 beginning with volume 1; Science Citation Index Expanded coverage from 2017 beginning at volume 3, issue 2; Scopus coverage from 2021 backfilled to volume 1. The practical consequence is that the journal's entire run is retrievable through the major biomedical and multidisciplinary indexes, and its articles carry DOIs under MDPI's publishing programme with full-text hosting on the MDPI platform.

Guidance for authors

Submission is through MDPI's online system via the journal homepage, and the process is built for speed: the journal's own statistics page gives a median of 15 days from submission to first decision and 3 days from acceptance to publication. Those medians are among the fastest in the field and are a genuine part of the journal's offer, but authors should understand what they imply. Decisions at that pace depend on the manuscript arriving complete and clearly within scope: full methodical detail, as the journal requires; figures and supplementary material ready at submission; and a cover case that places the work inside cell biology, molecular biology or biophysics rather than in a clinical frame. MDPI is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics, and the journal's pages state that submissions are screened with iThenticate against prior publications, with a stated zero-tolerance approach to plagiarism and data falsification — standard practice, worth knowing before rather than after submission. The article processing charge of CHF 2,700 (per the DOAJ listing) falls due on acceptance, so authors relying on grant or institutional funds should confirm the charge and any institutional agreement with MDPI before submitting, not after acceptance. Finally, authors choosing among MDPI's many neighbouring titles should note that Cells is the publisher's broad cell biology home: work whose centre is a single disease, organ system or method may fit one of the more specialised sister journals better, and the editorial office may say so. A well-aimed submission to the broad journal is one whose interest extends beyond a single subfield — a mechanism, a method or a resource that other cell biologists will use.

How the journal fills its pages: sections and topical collections

Understanding Cells requires understanding its production model, because the model explains both its scale and its texture. The journal is organised into subject sections — the current board shows sections for Mitochondria, Cell Signaling, Cell and Gene Therapy, Cellular Biophysics and Intracellular and Plasma Membranes among others — each led by a section editor-in-chief who is an active researcher in that area, supported by associate editors and a large editorial board. Onto that standing structure, the journal layers a continuous programme of guest-edited special issues and topical collections, in which invited guest editors frame a theme — a pathway, a disease mechanism, a method — and curate submissions around it. Its tenth-anniversary year, 2021, was marked by a long run of such anniversary collections across its sections, on themes from cellular ageing to cellular immunology and the cell microenvironment. For authors, the practical effect is that there is almost always a live collection adjacent to a given manuscript's topic, offering a themed home and a guest editor whose interests the work directly addresses; for readers, the effect is that the journal reads less like a single periodical and more like a federation of overlapping micro-journals that share one ISSN, one platform and one editorial office. Neither effect is a judgement of quality in either direction — the journal's citation record, set out above, is what it is — but a profile that omitted the model would misdescribe how a journal founded in 2012 came to list more than 21,700 articles by late 2026.

The model also clarifies the journal's relationship with its own history. A quarterly that published modest volumes in 2012 and 2013 became, step by step, a semimonthly and then a continuous high-throughput operation, and its indexing milestones mark the stages of that professionalisation: PubMed within a year of launch, the Science Citation Index Expanded within five years, Scopus — with its customary backfill to volume 1 — within nine. The first Impact Factor, 4.829 for 2017, placed it mid-table in the Cell Biology category (55th of 190, Q2 on the figures MDPI announced at the time); the rise to 7.666 for 2021 and the subsequent settling at 6.0, alongside the SCImago Q1 standing recorded above, trace a journal that converted early visibility into a durable first-quartile position while its volume multiplied several times over. That combination — very large, very fast, and still first-quartile on its headline measures — is the factual core of the journal's reputation, and it is why Cells is so often the comparison point when newer broad-scope open access titles are assessed.

Reading the stored record

The Journals World record for Cells previously named the publisher only as a numeric code and gave coverage as 2011–2026. The publisher is MDPI AG of Basel, Switzerland. The coverage start deserves a note: this directory's intake read 2011 from its source data, but MDPI's own journal history is unambiguous that the inaugural issue was released in 2012, the founding editorial appeared in volume 1 in 2012, and its DOAJ listing dates from December 2012 — so the journal's publication run is 2012–present, and the stored 2011 start is best read as a data artefact from the journal's announcement period rather than a publication year. No ISSN needs to be added: 2073-4409 is the journal's only ISSN, and it agrees across MDPI, the DOAJ and OpenAlex. The record's twin-check for this update found no other Journals World record carrying this ISSN; cell-related titles in the directory, such as BMC Cell Biology, are distinct journals with their own ISSNs and records.

Frequently asked questions

Is Cells open access? Yes — fully. Articles are published under a CC BY licence with copyright retained by the authors, funded by an article processing charge recorded by the DOAJ as CHF 2,700.

What is Cells' Impact Factor? MDPI's journal statistics page displays 6.0, alongside a CiteScore of 11.4. The journal's historical peak was 7.666 for 2021.

Who edits Cells? The founding and current editor-in-chief is Dr Alexander E. Kalyuzhny of the University of Minnesota, in post since the journal's launch in 2012, supported by section editors-in-chief for the journal's subject sections.

How fast is Cells? MDPI's statistics page gives medians of 15 days from submission to first decision and 3 days from acceptance to publication.

Does Cells have a print edition? No. It is an online-only journal with a single electronic ISSN, 2073-4409.

Sources and verification

Compiled in November 2026 from: MDPI's Cells pages consulted directly — the aims and scope page (scope, article types, CC BY terms, COPE membership and iThenticate screening), the journal history page (2012 inaugural issue, PubMed 2013, SCIE 2017, Scopus 2021, founding editor tenure), the editorial board page (editor-in-chief and section structure), the journal statistics page (Impact Factor 6.0, CiteScore 11.4, decision and production medians) and the journal homepage (21,729 articles listed); MDPI's anniversary coverage for the 2021 Impact Factor of 7.666 and the first Impact Factor announcement (4.829 for 2017); the Directory of Open Access Journals listing for ISSN 2073-4409 (publisher MDPI AG, CC BY, APC CHF 2,700, listed December 2012); SCImago-based listings (h-index 196; SJR 1.670 in the 2024 series and 1.687 in the 2025 series; Q1 best quartile); and the OpenAlex source record for ISSN 2073-4409 (21,755 works, 612,522 citations, h-index 234, two-year mean citedness 6.94, leading topics). Metrics change with each annual release; figures are those displayed or computed by their named sources when checked.