Genome Medicine

About Genome Medicine

Overview

Genome Medicine is a peer-reviewed, fully open-access medical journal published continuously by BioMed Central, part of the BMC and Springer Nature family, from the United Kingdom. Its saved Journals World record (post 1808, slug genome-medicine) stores BioMed Central Ltd as publisher, the United Kingdom as country, the single ISSN 1756-994X, and coverage from 2009. The journal's own aims and scope, fetched from its official about page for this profile, state its mission precisely: it publishes outstanding research of broad interest in the application of genetics, genomics and multi-omics to understand, diagnose and treat disease, and it aims to bridge the basic-science and clinical-research communities. That bridging mission, and the word medicine in the title, are what distinguish it from genomics journals that stop at discovery: a Genome Medicine paper is expected to carry its genomic finding toward a diagnosis, a treatment, a clinical decision, a guideline, or a clearly argued implication for the clinical and ethical management of health and disease.

The journal was established in 2009, described in bibliographic summaries as a companion journal to Genome Biology, and it has published continuously, without conventional issue-based pacing, since launch. All articles are made freely and permanently readable online immediately on publication, with no subscription charge or registration barrier, under the journal's open-access policy as stated on its official site. The editor-in-chief recorded in bibliographic summaries is Rabia Begum. Its Directory of Open Access Journals record, retrieved directly through the DOAJ search API for this profile, confirms the essentials independently: eISSN 1756-994X, publisher BMC in Great Britain, open access since 2009, English language, subjects Medicine and Genetics, keywords genetics, genomics, multi-omics, precision medicine and systems medicine, single-anonymous peer review, DOI as its persistent-identifier scheme, and preservation through CLOCKSS, LOCKSS, PubMed Central and Portico.

Source-backed journal facts

Title: Genome Medicine. Abbreviation: Genome Med. (ISO 4: Genome Med.). Publisher as stored on this record: BioMed Central Ltd, shown in DOAJ as BMC. Country: United Kingdom, confirmed in both the stored record and the DOAJ publisher country field GB. ISSN: 1756-994X, electronic only; there is no separate print ISSN in any source consulted, and the single-ISSN identity on this record is correct rather than incomplete. First year: 2009. Language: English. Frequency: continuous publication. Access: fully open access, immediate, with authors retaining copyright under the journal's stated policy and articles licensed for reuse, with DOAJ recording licence types CC BY and CC BY-NC-ND among the journal's licence records. CODEN: GMEECG.

Charges require the same care as metrics, because several figures circulate. The journal's own about page, in the version retrieved in search results for this research, states the current article processing charge as £3,590, $5,290 or €4,290, determined from the date an article is accepted. The DOAJ record retrieved directly for this profile lists maximum charges of €4,490, $5,490 and £3,690, and records that a waiver policy exists, linking the publisher's article-charge waiver policy for eligible countries. Those two sets cannot both be the live price at the same moment for the same article type; they are successive or differently-scoped snapshots of a changing price list, and this profile reports both with their sources rather than blending them. An author must take the operative figure from the journal's submission pages at the time of acceptance. Older pages quoting far lower charges are historical and must not be budgeted from. Publication time in the DOAJ record is 10 weeks, which matches the long-standing summary figure for average time from submission to publication carried in journal-guide sources.

Scope in detail, from the journal's own statement

The official aims and scope fetched for this profile name the territory directly. The journal bridges basic science and clinical research in areas that include cancer genomics, immuno-oncology, immunogenomics, infectious disease, neurogenomics, cardiogenomics, clinical genomics, gene therapies, microbiome research, systems medicine, precision medicine and clinical trials. It welcomes original research, methodology, software and guideline articles, together with expert reviews and commentary, across all areas of human health and disease. An earlier form of the same statement, still carried in library and journal-guide summaries, adds the translational framing: peer-reviewed research articles, new methods and software tools in all areas of medicine studied from a post-genomic perspective, with review and comment on advances in translational genomics and personalised medicine and their implications for clinical and ethical management.

The journal's internal sections, as recorded in bibliographic summaries, organise that territory into six parts: genomics and epigenomics of disease; pharmacogenomics and personalised medicine; genomic epidemiology and public-health genomics; proteomics and metabolomics in medicine; systems medicine and informatics; and ethical, legal and social issues. That section list is a practical fit test. A submission should be able to say which section it belongs to and why its finding matters to readers in the neighbouring sections. A cancer-genomics paper belongs when the genomic result changes classification, prognosis, treatment selection or trial design for patients, not merely when a tumour has been sequenced. A clinical-genomics paper belongs when it advances diagnosis, variant interpretation, screening or management in a way other services can adopt. A pharmacogenomics paper belongs when genotype should change prescribing. A methods or software paper belongs when the tool demonstrably improves a medical application of genomics — sensitivity, interpretation, turnaround, cost or clinical usability — rather than offering a marginal gain on a developer's test data, a comparison described here in ordinary words because the journal will make exactly that demand.

Multi-omics is in the title-level mission for a reason: work that integrates genomics with transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics or microbiome data to reach a clinical conclusion is especially aligned, as is systems-medicine work that models a disease as a network and tests the model's clinical prediction. Ethical, legal and social analysis is not decorative at this journal; the return of results, consent for genomic testing, data sharing, equity of access to genomic medicine, and the governance of clinical sequencing are within scope as scholarly subjects in their own right, provided the argument is rigorous and grounded in evidence or in a real policy or clinical setting.

Article types and editorial expectations

The content types named across the journal's official and DOAJ-linked pages are original research, methodology articles, software articles, database and guideline articles, reviews, opinions and commentaries, with research articles, new methods and software tools emphasised since the earliest statement of scope. Guidelines and consensus-type articles carry particular weight in a journal whose readers include clinical services deciding how to implement genomic testing, because a well-evidenced guideline can standardise practice across centres. Reviews are expected to be expert and selective rather than exhaustive summaries, and commentary is expected to engage a live question in translational genomics or precision medicine.

Editorially, the journal presents itself, in its own journal-family descriptions, as offering rapid evaluation and continuous communication on a manuscript's progress, with in-house editors working with carefully selected reviewers and, where necessary, an editorial board of international experts to ensure a constructive process. The DOAJ record specifies the review model as single-anonymous peer review: reviewers know the authors, authors do not know the reviewers. The publisher's journal page, in the version retrieved for this research, also records participation in the NISO and STM working-group pilot on peer-review taxonomy, with identity transparency described as single anonymised, reviewer interaction with the editor, and no review information published. Authors should therefore expect editorial screening for broad interest and clinical relevance before external review, and should write the abstract and significance framing for a clinician-scientist reader, not only for a genomics specialist.

Speed, usage and the publisher's own metrics page

The publisher-linked metrics summary retrieved for this research gives a coherent 2024 picture, kept together here as one dated set: Journal Impact Factor 11.2 for 2024, five-year Journal Impact Factor 13.8, Source Normalized Impact per Paper 2.377 for 2024, and SCImago Journal Rank 5.078 for 2024, with median submission to first editorial decision of 8 days, median submission to acceptance of 224 days, downloads of 2,724,546 in 2024, and 2,349 Altmetric mentions. Read together, those figures describe a journal that decides quickly at the desk, takes a substantial time over full review and revision for the papers it accepts — seven months and more at the median — and is then read at a scale of millions of downloads a year. The journal's about material also claims more than 3.5 million annual downloads in a later snapshot, which is consistent with growth rather than contradiction, and both figures are reported here as publisher claims with their context rather than as audited counts.

The practical lesson is that rapid evaluation at this journal means a rapid first answer, not a rapid acceptance. Authors with a time-critical clinical or competitive result can expect the submission to be assessed promptly, and should be prepared for a demanding revision path if it proceeds. The DOAJ publication-time figure of 10 weeks should be read as an average across article types in that directory record, not as a reconciliation with the acceptance median above; the two come from different sources, different periods and different definitions, and this profile preserves both attributions instead of manufacturing a single tidy number.

Metrics and standing, with sources and dates

The stored Journals World record, drawn from the SCImago 2025 dataset, places Genome Medicine in Q1 with an SJR of 4.971 and an H-index of 147, lists coverage of 2009 to 2026, assigns Q1 categories in Genetics, Genetics (clinical), Molecular Biology and Molecular Medicine, and reports a compact, selective document volume consistent with the stored excerpt's figures for its latest reporting window. The publisher's 2024 metrics set, detailed in the previous section, gives SJR 5.078 for 2024 against the stored record's 4.971 for 2025 — a small year-to-year movement between successive SCImago editions, not a discrepancy to resolve by choosing one and hiding the other.

Journal Citation Reports figures likewise need their years. The 2024 impact factor is 11.2, as given in the publisher's metrics page and repeated in bibliographic summaries. An aggregator page retrieved in search gives 10.8 as its latest figure, without a clearly attached edition in the snippet retrieved, and another aggregator gives 13.8, which coincides with the publisher's stated five-year figure for 2024 and is therefore likely a five-year value presented out of context on that page. This profile relies on the publisher's labelled set — 11.2 as the 2024 Journal Impact Factor and 13.8 as the 2024 five-year figure — and flags the aggregator numbers as unverified or mislabelled rather than repeating them as fact. A Scopus-oriented summary gives a CiteScore of 18 against the stored record's data family. The substantive standing is unambiguous across all labelled sources: Q1 in every one of its assigned categories, a top-decile presence in clinical genetics by the category positions reported in metrics summaries, and citation influence at the level of the leading translational genomics titles.

Open access, licensing, preservation and waivers

Open access at Genome Medicine is structural, not optional: all articles are freely and permanently accessible immediately on publication, authors are the copyright holders of their articles under the journal's stated policy, and readers may reuse material under the licence attached to each article. The DOAJ record lists CC BY and CC BY-NC-ND among the journal's licences, confirms that plagiarism detection is in place, records preservation through CLOCKSS, LOCKSS, PubMed Central and Portico with the Library of Congress named as the national-library partner, and notes a deposit policy registered with the Open Policy Finder service. For a clinical author, the PubMed Central route matters most in daily terms: articles enter the same full-text repository that clinicians and guideline writers actually search, which is part of how a fully open journal with a 2009 start has accumulated the download volumes the publisher reports.

On cost, the governing facts are that a charge applies on acceptance, that its current amount must be taken from the journal at the time, that the DOAJ record confirms a waiver policy exists and links the publisher's waiver policy for authors in eligible countries, and that institutional membership and agreement arrangements within the Springer Nature and BMC family may cover or reduce the charge for some authors. The journal's earlier guidance, preserved in library summaries, states the enduring principle that authors from low-income countries are routinely considered for waivers and that member institutions may have the charge covered by membership. Authors for whom the charge would be a barrier should raise the waiver question at submission, not after acceptance, and should document the funding position honestly; a charge in the range shown by the current publisher and DOAJ snapshots is a real budget item for an unfunded clinical study, and no part of this profile pretends otherwise.

Indexing and discoverability

Bibliographic summaries list the journal as abstracted and indexed in BIOSIS Previews, Chemical Abstracts Service, Index Medicus, MEDLINE and PubMed, the Science Citation Index Expanded, and Scopus, with aggregator summaries adding DOAJ, PubMed Central visibility and Embase. The DOAJ listing itself was verified directly for this profile through the directory's API, not through a third party's claim, which is the standard this site applies to open-access claims: a journal is described as DOAJ-listed here only when the directory's own record has been seen. For authors, the combined coverage means a paper is discoverable through clinical searching, citation evaluation and open-access directories simultaneously, and its full text is preserved in multiple archives independent of the publisher's own platform.

Who should submit, and who should look elsewhere

Submit here if the work applies genetics, genomics or multi-omics to a medical problem with broad interest: a diagnostic advance, a treatment-relevant genomic classification, a trial or cohort result that changes precision-medicine practice, a gene-therapy or immunogenomic finding with clinical reach, a validated method or software tool that clinical and translational groups will adopt, or a rigorous analysis of the ethical and service-delivery questions genomic medicine creates. The common thread the editors will look for is the bridge: basic finding on one side, clinical consequence on the other, with the argument between them made explicitly. Look elsewhere if the work is discovery genomics with no current medical application — Genome Biology and other discovery titles are the natural homes — if it is a single-patient case with no generalisable genomic lesson, if it is a narrow subspecialty clinical study in which genomics plays no real part, or if the cohort or validation is too small to support the clinical claim being made. Those are fit judgements, not quality judgements, and making them honestly before submission is the fastest route to the right journal.

Frequently asked questions

Is Genome Medicine fully open access? Yes. Its official policy makes all articles freely and permanently readable immediately on publication, it has been open access since its 2009 launch, and its DOAJ record was verified directly for this profile.

What does it charge? A charge applies on acceptance. The journal's about page as retrieved states £3,590, $5,290 or €4,290; the DOAJ record lists maximums of £3,690, $5,490 and €4,490 and confirms a waiver policy. Take the operative figure from the journal at submission or acceptance, because the published snapshots differ.

What is its impact factor? 11.2 for 2024 on the publisher's metrics page, with a five-year figure of 13.8 for 2024; the SCImago 2025 record on this site gives SJR 4.971 and Q1 in Genetics, Genetics (clinical), Molecular Biology and Molecular Medicine.

How fast is review? The publisher reports a median of 8 days to first editorial decision and 224 days to acceptance for 2024, while DOAJ records a 10-week publication time; the figures come from different sources and definitions and both are reported with attribution.

Is it related to Genome Biology? Yes, as a companion title from the same publisher family, with a distinct mission: Genome Medicine carries genomics toward clinical application, diagnosis and treatment.

Sources and verification note

This profile is anchored to the post's own stored record for title, slug, publisher, country, ISSN, coverage and SCImago 2025 metrics, and to the live page structured data carrying the same single ISSN. The aims and scope are quoted from the journal's official about page fetched directly for this research. Open-access policy, charges and annual metrics are taken from the journal's official about and conditions pages as retrieved, with the 2024 metrics set reported as a single labelled group. The DOAJ record was retrieved through the DOAJ search API for ISSN 1756-994X and is the basis for every DOAJ-related statement, including peer-review model, preservation services, licence types, waiver existence and directory charge maximums. History, the companion relationship to Genome Biology, the six sections, the editor-in-chief and the wider indexing list are taken from bibliographic summaries and are attributed as such. Where publisher, directory and aggregator figures differ, the profile reports the labelled figures side by side and relies on the publisher's labelled set, rather than selecting a single flattering number.