Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy

About Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy

Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy: An Open Access Journal at the Bench-to-Clinic Interface

Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy (STTT) is a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed open access journal launched in 2016 and published within the Nature Portfolio by Springer Nature. It is affiliated with West China Hospital of Sichuan University, and its founding proposition is contained in its title: the molecular signalling pathways that cells use to grow, divide, differentiate and die are the same pathways that modern drug development has learned to target, and a journal that covers the pathway biology and the therapy in one venue can serve the translational community better than separate basic and clinical titles. A decade after launch, the journal has become one of the most highly cited titles in its area — a rise this profile documents carefully, because its headline metrics have moved so fast that older records, including the template this profile replaces, are badly out of date.

The journal's own statement of purpose, published on its official journal information page at nature.com, is to accomplish timely publication of the latest discoveries and progress in both basic science and clinical research related to signal transduction and targeted therapy, including research on major human diseases such as cancer and autoimmune disorders. Everything else in this profile — scope, article types, charges, metrics — should be read against that deliberately translational framing.

Quick Facts

One correction to stored directory data matters here. The journal is sometimes filed with the United Kingdom as its country and a numeric code as its publisher. The publisher is Springer Nature; the journal is an international Nature Portfolio title whose academic affiliation is West China Hospital in Chengdu, China — a partnership reflected in its Chinese serial number and in the composition of its editorial leadership. Country labels in aggregator databases describe the publisher's corporate seat, not the journal's academic home, and readers should not be misled by them.

Scope: What Counts as Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy

The publisher's journal information page defines the coverage as multidisciplinary, including but not limited to molecular biology, cell biology, pharmacology, medicinal chemistry, computational chemistry, systems biology, bioinformatics and clinical medicine. In practice, submissions cluster around a recognisable set of questions, and prospective authors should test their manuscript against them.

Pathway biology. Work that maps, perturbs or re-interprets signalling networks — receptor tyrosine kinase cascades, PI3K–AKT–mTOR and MAPK signalling, Wnt, Hedgehog and Notch pathways, NF-kB and inflammatory signalling, apoptosis and autophagy regulation, and the crosstalk among them — forms the journal's basic-science core. The expectation is mechanistic depth: a pathway paper should change what readers believe about how the network behaves, not merely catalogue another correlation.

Target discovery and validation. Studies identifying new druggable nodes in a pathway, establishing causality with genetic or pharmacological perturbation, and characterising resistance mechanisms — the reasons targeted drugs stop working — sit at the centre of the journal's translational mission.

Therapeutics and drug development. Small-molecule inhibitors, monoclonal antibodies, antibody–drug conjugates, degraders, and nucleic-acid therapeutics, from preclinical characterisation through clinical evaluation, are in scope where the work advances understanding of the target or the treatment, rather than reporting a routine formulation exercise.

Clinical and translational studies. Trials and clinically grounded studies of targeted agents, biomarker work that stratifies patients by pathway status, and studies of major human diseases — the journal names cancer and autoimmune disorders explicitly, and its contents extend across metabolic, cardiovascular, neurological and infectious disease where a signalling mechanism is the story.

Reviews and commentary. The journal publishes substantial review articles synthesising a pathway or a therapeutic class, together with shorter Research Highlights and Comments that frame new findings for the wider readership. The two-tier charge structure described below reflects these article types.

Editorial Leadership and Peer Review

The journal is led by three editors-in-chief whose appointments themselves map the journal's intended geography and range: David J. Kerr of the University of Oxford, a clinical oncologist long associated with colorectal cancer research and cancer policy; Kang Zhang, associated with the Macau University of Science and Technology, whose work spans ophthalmology, stem cell biology and artificial intelligence in medicine; and Yu-Quan Wei of the West China Medical Center of Sichuan University, an oncologist and academician whose institution anchors the journal's affiliation. The publisher describes the wider editorial team as a board of researchers from across the globe, and the masthead should be consulted on the journal site for the current full list, which changes as members rotate.

Peer review follows the Nature Portfolio's standard model: editorial assessment of scope and significance before external review, expert refereeing, and editorial decisions communicated through the publisher's submission system. The journal publishes article-level metrics — downloads, citations and online attention are displayed on each article page, as the publisher notes — which gives authors an unusually transparent view of how a published paper is being received. As with all high-demand titles, the significance threshold at editorial triage is the main hurdle; technically sound work that advances only its immediate niche is more likely to be redirected than reviewed.

Open Access, Licensing and Charges — The Verified Figures

STTT is a fully open access journal. The publisher's open access page states that all articles are made freely and permanently available online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers, and that authors retain copyright in their articles, granting third parties the right to use, reproduce and disseminate the work. The journal's record in the Directory of Open Access Journals — verified directly against the DOAJ API for this profile — confirms the licence as CC BY 4.0, records that the journal has been open access since 2016 without embargo, and confirms that authors retain copyright without restrictions.

Charges are the point on which directory data most often goes stale, so the figures here are stated with their source. The publisher's current published article processing charges for the journal are: Original Research — £3,090 / $4,170 / €3,390; Research Highlight / Comment — £1,485 / $2,135 / €1,700. The applicable charge is determined from the date an article is accepted for publication, and VAT or local taxes may apply. The DOAJ record independently lists the journal's APC at USD 4,170, matching the publisher's Original Research dollar figure. The older stored figure attached to this journal in some directories, $3,790, is a superseded rate: anyone budgeting a submission should work from the publisher's open access page, not from aggregator records, and should check whether their institution holds a Springer Nature agreement that covers the charge, as many now do.

Metrics: A Fast-Moving Target, Documented by Year

No section of this profile carries a stronger warning than this one. STTT's citation metrics have risen at a pace that makes year-free citation of them meaningless, and different providers currently report strikingly different values for the same nominal year — a disagreement this profile reports rather than conceals.

The journal's impact factor as reported from Journal Citation Reports for the 2025 data year is 81.2. Secondary tracking services drawing on Scopus and JCR data report lower concurrent figures — one widely used tracker gives 51.260 for its 2025 calculation against 28.900 for 2024 — while the figure stored in this site's older template, 40.8, corresponds to an earlier cycle again, and the same tracker's historical series (5.429 in 2017, 6.000 in 2018, 13.368 in 2019, rising through the teens in the early 2020s) shows the trajectory clearly even where individual years differ by provider. The correct response to this divergence is not to average the numbers but to cite one provider, with its year, and to recognise the structural reasons for the spread: a young, review-rich, oncology-heavy journal's two-year citation window is extremely sensitive to which document types a database counts and to a small number of very highly cited papers.

Indicators that move more slowly agree on the journal's scale. SCImago's h-index for the journal is 224. Scopus CiteScore values reported for the journal by aggregators are in the eighties (81.6 in one current listing), placing it at or near the top of its Cancer Research and Genetics categories, where it holds Q1 standing. OpenAlex, consulted directly for this profile, records the source (S2739142469) with approximately 3,026 works and approximately 330,399 citations, Springer Nature as host organisation, and both ISSNs as listed in the quick facts table; its internally computed h-index differs from SCImago's, again because the underlying document sets differ. Authors reporting the journal's metrics in grant applications or promotion files should use the figure their institution's evaluators will themselves look up — normally the current Journal Citation Reports value — and date it.

Indexing and Discoverability

The publisher states that the journal is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded, Journal Citation Reports / Science Edition, BIOSIS Previews, the Directory of Open Access Journals, MEDLINE, PubMed Central and Scopus; aggregator listings add the expected downstream services. The MEDLINE and PubMed Central presence matters practically for clinical readers, and the DOAJ listing matters for funders and institutions that whitelist open access venues. Articles carry DOIs under Springer Nature's 10.1038 prefix, on the nature.com platform, with the journal's article pages exposing citation and attention metrics individually.

Who Should Submit — and Who Should Not

The journal is a realistic target for work that does at least two of three things: establishes a mechanism in a signalling pathway with rigorous perturbation evidence; connects that mechanism to a therapeutic strategy, a resistance problem or a patient-stratification biomarker; and speaks to an audience wider than one disease community. Strong review proposals from groups with a visible record in the area are also within its model. It is a poor target for purely descriptive omics without mechanistic follow-through, for incremental analogue chemistry without biological characterisation, for clinical reports whose targeted-therapy connection is nominal, and for work whose natural readership is a single small specialty — the editorial triage will usually say so quickly, which authors consistently report preferring to a slow rejection.

Before submitting, confirm three operational points on the journal site itself, because they change: the current APC in your currency and whether an institutional agreement covers it; the article type that fits your manuscript, since the charge and the review expectations differ between Original Research and the shorter formats; and the publisher's current data-availability and ethics declarations required at submission for animal, human and clinical-trial work.

Landmark Content and How the Journal Is Used

Because the journal is young, its identity has been shaped by a relatively small number of very heavily used papers, and understanding them explains both its citation profile and its editorial centre of gravity. Its review articles on signalling in cancer — including widely cited syntheses on PI3K–AKT–mTOR signalling, on ferroptosis as a regulated cell-death pathway with therapeutic implications, and on the tumour microenvironment as a signalling ecosystem rather than a passive backdrop — became standard references within a few years of publication, assigned in graduate courses and cited by authors who needed an authoritative pathway summary in a single paragraph of their introductions. During the COVID-19 pandemic the journal also published heavily cited reviews on the signalling and host-response biology of SARS-CoV-2 infection, which demonstrated the breadth its editors claim for it: an infectious-disease topic belonged in the journal precisely because the mechanisms at stake were signalling mechanisms and the interventions at stake were targeted therapies.

Three distinct readerships use the journal in three distinct ways. Basic researchers read it to keep their pathway knowledge current beyond their own cascade, and mine its reviews for the figures — most articles include detailed pathway diagrams — that anchor lectures and grant introductions. Translational and clinical researchers use its trial and biomarker coverage to judge which targeted agents and resistance mechanisms matter beyond a single tumour type, and its presence in PubMed Central and MEDLINE puts that material inside the clinical literature's normal search habits. Drug developers in industry read its target-validation and resistance coverage as competitive and scientific intelligence: a mechanism reviewed here has, in effect, been certified as one the academic community takes seriously. Authors deciding where to submit should ask which of these audiences their paper must reach; a manuscript that serves none of them will struggle at triage however competent it is.

A final practical point concerns timing and expectations. Continuous publication means accepted articles appear without waiting for an issue, and the journal's article pages display download and citation attention from the start, so authors can demonstrate early impact concretely in reports and applications. Against that, the journal's visibility cuts both ways: papers published here are read by exactly the specialists best placed to scrutinise them, and post-publication commentary on high-profile claims is a normal part of this journal's ecosystem. Submitting work here means submitting it to be argued with in public, by experts, quickly — which is, for the right manuscript, the strongest reason to choose it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the journal's ISSNs? Online ISSN 2059-3635; print ISSN 2095-9907; Chinese serial number CN 51-1758/R — all as stated on the publisher's journal information page.

Who publishes it? Springer Nature, within the Nature Portfolio. The journal is affiliated with West China Hospital, Sichuan University. Records rendering the publisher as a bare number are garbled.

Who edits it? Editors-in-chief David J. Kerr, Kang Zhang and Yu-Quan Wei, per the publisher's journal information page.

Is it genuinely open access? Yes — fully open access since 2016, CC BY 4.0 licensing, authors retain copyright, verified against the journal's DOAJ record as well as the publisher's statements.

What does it cost to publish? At the publisher's published rates at the time of writing: $4,170 (£3,090 / €3,390) for Original Research and $2,135 (£1,485 / €1,700) for Research Highlights and Comments, with taxes where applicable and institutional agreements potentially covering the charge. Older figures in directories are superseded.

What is its impact factor? Reported as 81.2 for the 2025 Journal Citation Reports data year; other providers report different concurrent values, as detailed in the metrics section. Cite provider and year.

When was it founded? 2016. Its coverage in Scopus-based records runs continuously from 2016 to the present.

A Note on the Journal's Name and Records

Because the journal's title describes two general concepts, it is sometimes confused in databases with older, unrelated titles in signal transduction and with conference proceedings in targeted therapy. The reliable identifiers are the ones given in this profile: the ISSN pair 2059-3635 and 2095-9907, the CN number 51-1758/R, the Nature Portfolio journal code sigtrans in its web addresses, and publication beginning in 2016. A record that matches the title but carries a different ISSN, a start year before 2016, or a publisher other than Springer Nature is a different serial, and metrics or charges attached to such a record should not be transferred to this journal. Authors citing the journal should use its standard abbreviation, Signal Transduct. Target. Ther., exactly as it appears in the reference lists of the articles themselves.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile rests on the publisher's official journal information and open access pages at nature.com (scope, ISSNs, CN number, editors-in-chief, affiliation, indexing list, APC schedule, licensing and copyright statements), the journal's record retrieved directly from the Directory of Open Access Journals API (licence CC BY 4.0, APC USD 4,170, open access since 2016, publisher country recorded there as the United Kingdom — the corporate-seat artefact discussed above), Journal Citation Reports figures as reported for the 2025 data year, SCImago h-index data, and a direct OpenAlex source record (S2739142469) consulted for this profile. Where providers' metrics diverge, the divergence is reported in the text rather than resolved by assertion.